Roger McKenzie

Sometimes the Old is the New!

2012-01-31T11:57:00.001Z

For all my (some would say unhealthy) fixation with social media as a way of reaching and organising workers I have never lost sight of the need for actually just talking with folks. It is in fact, after all, the way that unions were developed in the first place.

I have the honour of spending some time with the Harvard Union of Clerical Workers. They have taken the practice of workplace "floor walking" to a different level. Just yesterday I walked around a hospital in Worcester Massachusetts with a couple of colleagues from the union and saw first hand how they work. Each union rep has a "beat" that they regularly walk and through that develop a close relationship with workers in that area. I was surprised how many people, including management, stopped us. I was even more surprised when I was told it was a quite day! The work doesn't end with the walk around. There is a thorough and regular de-brief of what issues people came across each day.

I'm sure that I've over-simplified this and I'm also sure that this approach would not work everywhere we in UNISON organise - many of our members simply don't work in workplaces like hospitals and the relationship is increasingly more hostile than I witnessed yesterday. However, this is another organising technique that should be added to our toolkit. Organisers can decide whether this approach will work or be adapted for their particular circumstances.

I firmly believe that there is no one way to organise and that we should do what works for us in the particular environment and workplace in which we are organising. However, we should never ever forget, whatever organising techniques we apply, that we will never succeed in building strong and sustainable workplace organisation unless we prioritise membership contact time. It was and is one of the great organising lessons of the current pensions dispute.

Funny how the old ways of organising are actually still the best. But when you think about it using social media or smartphones to aid organising is still just a variation of that old theme. A theme that will become even more important as more and more of our members end up, even with our best efforts, in privatised or fragmented workplaces or, as many of our members can testify in no "traditional" workplace at all.

A key aim of our new National Strategic Organising Unit, under it's newly appointed head Greg Thomson, will be to ensure that good practice is spread around our union quickly in a way that's accessible to organisers. Maximising worker and membership contact time, all all kinds of workplaces and environments, will be a priority area of this work.

Learning to Live ...and to Organise

2011-11-27T20:08:00.000Z

Yesterday I had the very real pleasure to be part of a celebration event for UNISON members in the East Midlands. At a hotel in Nottingham around 70 of our members came together to celebrate their achievements in returning to learning. They had completed courses ranging from basic education through to shop stewards training. I had the honour of being asked to present the certificates and to say a few words to the gathering.

These learners, the vast majority who were women,from a very wide age range, had overcome the very difficult first step of going back into a learning environment, often for the first time in many years, and often having been told that they would never succeed academically. The look of pure joy on the faces of these learners was just the most amazingly uplifting experience I have had for some considerable time.

The confidence that was palpable amongst these learners was something that had been significantly developed during the various courses that people had succeeded in. I couldn't help remembering how I myself had gone rough a similar experience and had been the beneficiary of excellent trade union education. If the experience of these learners is similar to mine then they will feel more able to not just go on to further learning, having broken down that particular taboo, but they will also feel more confident to take a more active role in our union and to help us to organise for more power in the workplace for our members.

I am such a fan of the role that unions play through learning and trade union education to empower workers to organise for power in their workplaces and to seize back the initiative from those in society who seem intent on waging a war against working people. We must now work to make sure that the courses we provide are fully tailored to the realities of people's working lives as well as how we intend to go forward with our organising strategies.

Education really is power!

Renewing our Trade Unionism With Big Ideas

2011-11-12T18:09:00.000Z

There is far too much loose talk about trade union renewal. I guess I have been as guilty as anyone in succumbing to the temptation to call for the renewal of our movement. I also guess that I'm about to succumb yet again.

I should say, by way of justification, if one is needed, that my latest offering to the debate about union renewal was stimulated by listening to Will Hutton speak to Oxford Labour Party last night. Will Hutton spoke of the need for bold and imaginative thinking to confront the unprecedented economic challenge we now find ourselves in. I didn't agree with all that Will Hutton said in his contribution (which I will pick up in another blog post in the future) what I was impressed with was his extremely bold, clear, innovative and thoroughly imaginative thinking. While understanding that not everyone in the room would necessarily agree with his ideas or policy proposals what struck me was his understanding that this was a time for big thinking and big ideas.

Not being an economist, and given everything else going on right now, my mind drifted to the challenges we face in the trade union movement. By that I don't just mean the huge and unprecedented attacks taking place on public services and on the hard working people who strive to deliver them - and these are truly huge and unprecedented in their size and ferocity - but I thought of what environment we in UNISON will have to try and organise in and how we go about out task.

UNISON is a truly democratic union so coming up here with policy proposals out of the blue that have yet to be discussed within our family is not at all appropriate. However, we can all see, without the gift of second sight, what the future public sector workplace might look like. In fact for many workers delivering public services, as successful as we might be as a union, they will not enjoy the benefits of the traditional workplace. Indeed, for many they may only rarely see a work colleague, going from their home, delivering a service in someones home and then perhaps going directly to another 'clients' home. This is already a reality for many UNISON members and for thousands of public sector workers. The challenge for us is to find ways of recruiting and organising these workers.

As the workplace, the standard foundation of our organising, transforms even further, we have to find new and more imaginative ways of linking workers together so that they can enjoy the benefits of collective organisation and action even while they work in more isolated settings. That's why bold and imaginative thinking is called for. If we continue to organise on the basis of workplaces that are likely to become more scarce then, putting it mildly, that doesn't seem an altogether sensible approach.

A recognition of the different types of workplaces as well as the different types of jobs that workers do is fundamental to any union organising strategy. UNISON is no different. We already recognise that there is no one way to organise across a workforce as complicated and multi-faceted as the ones that we cover. If there is no one way to organise then, by definition, that means there are lots of different ways. This can either be seen as a negative or a positive. In my view this is completely positive and should have always been the song we sang. It means that we then do not try to organise by formula but, instead, we look at the workplace in front of us and decide what needs to be done and the tools we need (including organising techniques) to get the job done. No two workplaces are the same so why should our organising strategies be the same? Clearly they should not be.

How we organise in these new and challenging times will take bold and imaginative thinking that actually challenges our perceived wisdoms and the way that we have always done things. If we challenge ourselves and some of our past perceptions and working practices prove to still be correct and good for the current environment then we should continue to embrace them. If they do not meet the needs of these challenging times then we, in line with all other unions, will need to jettison them or, perhaps more accurately, simply add them to the armoury of tools that organisers can utilise but not slavishly adopt.

While I have always championed the utilisation of new social media and improved new technologies for organising I have never seen them as the only way to go. They are just tools to be used for organising. Gateways to our union or tools for our organisers. For me though there is no better organising technique than the oldest one of all - one worker talking directly with another one! For me it's how we use this oldest of all organising techniques effectively that will be one of the biggest success indicators.

Trade union renewal is vital in my view. We are under immense attack where the very basic principles of our movement, especially the worth of collectivism, through social provision, organisation or action, is under threat. So I think we need to not be afraid to say what it is we stand for as a movement but make sure that we are able to set it out in a way that makes sense to workers and organise it in a way that helps to build real power for working people in their working lives. That's going to require bold and imaginative thinking and to embrace a big ideas culture - even if, at first we don't really fully agree with some of the ideas we hear.

The Fierce Urgency of Now

2011-11-11T18:54:00.000Z

The great Martin Luther King jr once talked of the "fierce urgency of now". This profound statement referred primarily to the urgency of civil rights for African Americans. Today, in the UK, we are faced with our own fierce urgency of now.

Public sector workers and the jobs they do are under the fiercest assault that they probably have ever faced. The attack on services, jobs and the conditions of employment of the people providing much needed help to hard pressed local communities is not the usual tinkering around that we have, unfortunately, been all too used to in recent years. This is about whether public services,as we know them, should exist at all.

The Tories,and their Lib Dem mates, in spite of pre- election promises to the contrary, have decided on a massive restructuring of society. The financial collapse, by their mates who still find enough cash to pay each other massive bonuses, was, for them the perfect opportunity to dismantle beloved institutions such as the National Health Service - I repeat - in spite of promises to the contrary.

Working people are having to pay the price of the folly of the bankers by not only losing their jobs in the name of austerity but also seeing their living standards fall in very real terms. The fact that many thousands of public service workers have not had a pay rise for years and are likely not going to get one for some time. Taking money out the pockets of the lowest paid meaning that they had less money to spend in the economy is simply the craziest way of handling the economy. Surely this is an economy that needs money circulating rather than less? The only people who seem to have any money to spend are the rich and none of that seems to be trickling down to the most needy in teems of job creation.

The fierce urgency of now for working people in the UK is a plan B by this Government. There needs to be a plan for the economy that goes beyond the macho posturing of Chancellor Osborne towards one that recognises the real pain being felt by communities throughout the country.

The fierce urgency of now is for this country to not have to descend further into fighting outside soup kitchens that people have been reduced to in Coventry as hungry people argue and then fight over scraps from the van. This is true and is what we are being reduced too. The desperation that many young people feel as they worry about their future job prospects as youth unemployment rockets.

The fierce urgency of now for the women who seem to have been particularly targeted by this government as the people who rely the most on public services for the jobs they provide and the care they give.

The fierce urgency of now for the black community who, as always, come off the worst having started this period in economic history behind where everyone else started anyway.

We all have a fierce urgency of now. It's a fierce urgency of resistance. We must stand up and fight. The surest thing of all is that if we do not fight then we most certainly lose. However, if we fight we at least have a chance to win!

Just like Mosquitos

2011-10-24T17:26:00.000Z

Last week after I spoke at the UNISON Higher Education Seminar one of the delegates came up to me to have a brief chat. After very kindly saying how much she appreciated my speech she offered me a suggestion for how we can resist the reactionaries who seek to put us back to the Victorian times.

She said that she reminds people who wonder whether we can actually beat these people about the power of one single mosquito in a room. One mosquito in a room is a total nuisance she says. It has your total attention and you can spend your whole time trying to catch the pest. Imagine just what it would be like, she says, if we were all like Mosquitos together causing these reactionary politicians and their mates total hell by never giving up and just by being a total nuisance.

It just struck a chord with me that acts of resistance such as strikes and the occupations put us in the same category as mosquitos. I think that we have to just continue to use the tried and tested methods of resistance from our history alongside some of the new energy and tactics being adopted today in this country and elsewhere. Being a nuisance like a mosquito in our acts of resistance, just like the heroes of the Civil Rights Movement did, must be a good thing.

No Substitute for Organising

2011-10-12T18:31:00.000Z

I had the pleasure of spending yesterday afternoon at the UNISON Retired Members Conference in Chester. I wasn't feeling 100% and at one point the day before I even considered dropping out. I am so glad that I went along and was able to speak and take part in what I thought was a great panel discussion with my colleague Sian from out Health Group.

As always at these sessions I found myself inspired by some of the stories of organising that a number of the delegates related during the discussions. I have said on numerous occasions on this blog that resistance is fertile and certainly not futile. Delegates told us of organising campaigns that they were involved in that demonstrated just how much resistance is actually taking place on the ground to stand up for public services like our beloved National Health Service. People organising petitions, getting the message out into their communities and standing up for progressive politics.

It was awesome to be in the presence of such experience and knowledge and it reminded me that while there is certainly no substitute for experience there is also no substitute for working people coming together and organising. It's clear to me that we can't rely on politicians to rescue us - as the great Alice Walker said "we are the ones we have been waiting for". When we come together it's to organise. That's the experience we have. That experience reminds us that if we don't organise then things stay the same but when we organise we can achieve wonderful things and enormous change.

People Get Fairness!

2011-10-07T09:37:00.000Z

Paying more, for longer and getting nothing out of it at the end is not a difficult concept of fairness to understand. At least one would think so.

At a meeting yesterday in a hospital in Warwickshire one member of the audience clearly thought, and said, that she felt that paying more into your pension, for a longer period of time and seeing that money taken straight out by the Treasury to pay back to the bankers who had left this country in such a financial mess was fine. After all, she asserted, we all had a duty to pay back the "national debt".

Just as I was ready to launch a full scale rebuttal I was beaten to it by several other members of the audience. My role at that point was redundant. Everybody else got the idea of fairness and let it be known in no uncertain terms to their colleague, who it turned out worked in the hospital pension section.

The more we explain what's happening to public service workers the more they get angry and come to the union. I was told that after that particular meeting (one of five I spoke at yesterday)there was a rush on the union recruitment stall with several citing our presentation and their erstwhile colleague as the reason for them joining the union. Thinking of offering her an organisers job!

TUC statement on pensions

2011-09-14T16:26:00.001Z

Speaking at a press conference today (Wednesday) TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said:

'The TUC's public service unions met urgently today after the conclusion of the TUC's annual Congress to receive a report on the most recent round of negotiations with the government on public service pensions and to consider the next steps in their united campaign to defend decent pensions for millions of public services workers as part of their battle for decent pensions for all.

'The TUC and unions are committed to continuing the talks with the government, and with the relevant employers in each of the separate major public service pensions schemes, but the government is urged to bring new proposals to the table urgently to make progress possible. Today's meeting also agreed, however, given the failure of the government to engage properly in the negotiations, to step up the campaign and to hold a first day of action on Wednesday 30 November.

'Each union has been asked to consider taking what they judge to be the most appropriate form of action possible to show their support for this united campaign.

'This would range from strike action, where ballot mandates have been secured from members and unions judge that appropriate, through to lunchtime meetings, rallies and joint events with community groups and service users. The intention will be to take the call for pensions justice for both public and private sector workers to every corner of the land on that day in the biggest trade union mobilisation in a generation.

'Further consideration is being given to what further action may be appropriate beyond the day of action if progress towards a settlement is not secured.

'A further meeting will be held before the end of September to receive reports from unions on plans being made.'

'This call reflects the huge anger of public service workers over the threat to their pensions and the deep frustration over difficulties of securing government engagement in meaningful negotiations.

This planned day of action will be an unprecedented coming together of the whole public service workforce and the communities they serve in a united demand for pensions justice.

'We remain absolutely committed, in good faith, to seeking a fair negotiated settlement of this dispute so that this action will not be necessary. But the government needs to understand the strength of unions' resolve reflected in today's decision.'

Pensions - Time to Stand up and be Counted

2011-09-11T19:01:00.000Z

#TUC11 Ahead of Congress Dave Prentis tells the FT that UNISON members “did not cause this recession. They have seen the rich, the powerful, celebrities, milking the system and taking vast profits and now it’s ordinary people who are paying the price. It comes to a point where they are saying to us – not us to them – that we have got to stand up and be counted”:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/18134998-daea-11e0-a58b-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1XZ571wJc

Treacherous or Predictable?

2011-09-08T18:37:00.003Z

Like many my first reaction to the votes by the Tories and Lib Dems to murder our National Health Service was that it was an act of outright treachery. After all neither party said in their election campaigns that they would do such a thing. In fact I seem to remember that the Tories, in particular said that there would be no more top down reorganisation of the NHS. They clearly spoke with forked tongue!

To my mind the whole thing was as much predictable as it was treacherous. This is all their Christmases at once. It's the perfect storm of financial and economic crisis that allows them to make the sort of changes to the economic and social fabric of our country that they have only dreamt of. I could just imagine these toffs sitting there in their public schools and posh clubs years ago saying things like " if you could change anything what would you do?" I would imagine decimating the NHS would be pretty near the top of the list next to smash the unions and tighter immigration controls. All very predictable.

It seems to me that we need to be a lot more sophisticated than being surprised by some seemingly treacherous behaviour by these very rich career politicians. We need to understand that this was always going to be the challenge we faced and to concentrate on building the resistance. Politicians of whatever political shade understand only one thing - power!

I happen to believe that as working people, particularly through unions, we have the power to defeat the reactionary politics of this coalition government. Not just by sitting in front of the tv and cursing their latest atrocity but but engaging and organising for power in our workplaces and power within our communities. We have the power to defeat these people but only if we believe that we have the power and do not just succumb to the line we are fed that us mere plebs should know our place and accept the inevitable.

It feels like belief is in short supply. One of the tasks of the leaders of our resistance is to help to instill that sense of self belief.

Unions must reach out to the communities

2011-08-15T20:22:00.002Z

I am writing this from a house near Oakland, California, where in the early hours of New Year's Day in 2009 a Transit system police officer Johannes Mehserie killed unarmed young African-American Oscar Grant by shooting him in the back.

A number of bystanders captured the incident on digital and mobile phone cameras.

At his trial in June 2010 the jury found Mehserie guilty of involuntary manslaughter. This led to protests and serious incidents of looting, arson and rioting.

By the end of the year Mehserie had been sentenced to two years in prison after the federal government intervened with a civil rights prosecution.

Last week I woke to the news that back home, on a road I used to live on in Tottenham, young black man Mark Duggan had been shot and killed by a police officer.

The same scenario that emerged in Oakland - community protests and then more serious disturbances - was played out on the streets of north London.

Unlike the uprisings of the 1980s, these wider disturbances appear to be far more multiracial but they do share the commonality of taking place under a right-wing Tory government.

The wise words of the great Martin Luther King spring to mind.

"When you cut facilities, slash jobs, abuse power, discriminate, drive people into deeper poverty and shoot people dead while refusing to provide answers or justice, the people will rise up and express their anger and frustration if you refuse to hear their cries. A riot is the language of the unheard."

While violence cannot be condoned, it can't be wrong to understand why people might seize the opportunity to break a few windows or steal some goods just because they can.

Ministers showed how out of touch they were by initially refusing to return from their holidays and take personal charge of the crisis.

They seemed to think it was a mark of strength to stay away rather than another example of the incredible indifference that is the hallmark of this government.

The subsequent parliamentary debate saw predictable, sanctimonious claptrap emerging from many privileged mouths.

The left surely must respond by rising above the infantile jockeying for position and leadership that sadly often follows these sorts of incidents.

For those of us involved in progressive politics, including trade unionists, our task must be to identify a way out of the violence and disorder that will bring about meaningful and lasting change.

An important political opportunity is upon us. Explanations and solutions need to be presented to all these disaffected people who are rising up in the streets.

And the trade union movement must play a central role in bringing together progressive political forces with our allies in the community.

This is a chance to bring to life all those things that many of us have been saying for years about a new kind of trade unionism which represents our members not only at work but in every aspect of workers' lives.

In truth, this is not a new kind of trade unionism at all. It's a social justice trade unionism that we seemingly all but abandoned in the 1980s.

Social justice trade unionism means that we have to sit with our partners in the community who believe and are fighting for many of the same things that we are, check our "isms" at the door and talk about how we can work together in ways that will actually make a positive difference to communities in a way that neither civil disturbances in the street or self-righteous debates in Parliament will.

To make this happen, unions, as Unison certainly has, have to prioritise organising. Yes, we have to prioritise recruitment to our ranks because without this we can't help to deliver the power our members need in the workplace.

But we must also prioritise recruitment and organising within the workplace coupled with organising outside in the community.

As the battles to maintain public services and the jobs of those workers who deliver them continues to hot up, we must remember that the fight will not be won without the support of the communities we serve.

After all, our members are mothers, fathers, daughters and sons in their communities as well as workers in their workplaces.

When Martin Luther King lost his life supporting the Memphis sanitation workers' strike in 1968 it was about much more than a labour dispute. King was part of a social movement for economic and social justice. That's where the British trade union movement needs to be today.

(Written in a personal capacity and first published in the Morning Star - online on 15 August 2011)

Time to treat Smart-Arsitis

2011-08-04T23:38:00.001Z

It never ceases to amaze me how some folks think they know what's best for us poor working class folks. It seems to be a particularly prevalent disease amongst certain people who went to the top fee paying schools or universities. It's not even a disease that is restricted to one country. There seems to be a worldwide epidemic of "smart-arsitis".

There seems to be a thing about breeding a sense of superiority into some of these folks with often nothing to back it up. For example these sufferers of smart-arsitis seem to believe, perhaps because they went to these certain schools or universities or maybe just because they come from money, that they know how to run the economy. They make absurd statements that equate the economy of a nation with that of running a household. Simply rubbish and they know it. It's a way of talking down to us mere workers in a way that we can understand in our little simple minds. The fact that here we are again on the verge of another recession because these idiots choose to blame workers, latterly public sector workers, for economic problems instead of their mates (and relatives) in the financial world for what's happening is a sign of staggering incompetence.

I write this after hearing that the financial markets have crashed around the world amid fears about the state of the economy. The smart-arses across the world believe that taking money out of the pockets of workers so they can't spend money or making people redundant (again so they can't spend money) is somehow going to stimulate the economy. Presumably this is because the friends and relatives of the smart-arses (the employers) will, in their largess, after they have taken their profits, eventually create some low paying, un-unionised jobs for us poor folks. In the mean time the smart-arses are leading us into another recession. A recession possibly worse than the last one given our starting position.

People need to wake up. These smart-arses have no idea what they are doing. All that expensive schooling wasn't about education it was about power - how to get it and how to keep it! It's about time we mere underlings recognised our own power as working people and organised against these idiots.

The Platform 9 & 3/4 Approach to Speeches

2011-07-31T20:49:00.000Z

If you are a fan of Harry Potter then you will know all about the mysteries of Platform 9 and 3/4s. It's the entrance is between platform 9 and 10 at Kings X and you use it to get the Hogwarts Express. Apparently the best way of accessing the platform is to run head on through the brick wall. It is also, according to Kate, totally like one of my speeches. According to her I just get an idea in my head for a speech and just go for it head on.

I tried to deny it when Kate raised this during the course of a conversation (can't remember what the conversation was about) and even tried to claim that my speeches were highly thought out and structured. The more I argued the more Kate, and then I, laughed and compared my speech style to others the more I knew I was on a loser. I really am the one running headlong into the wall into platform 9 and 3/4s.

Ok so I may not be the worlds best orator or even the most intellectual in my delivery but I know I'm passionate about what I say because I believe it and want everyone else not just to believe it too but to organise to bring about progressive change in the same way that I want to. That's me now and that's all there ever will be so all I can say to all those who have a problem with that is expelliarmus!

In Praise of Oxford Labour Party

2011-07-31T20:22:00.000Z

Some weeks ago I posted a blog which bemoaned the treatment I received as someone new to Oxford Labour Party meetings. I thought long and hard about writing the piece but felt that I needed to in the light of what I thought was pretty shocking treatment weighed against my years of experience in the Party which told me that if you raise criticisms then you are likely to get a fairly negative reaction.

While I thought that some of the party members who took the trouble to read my blog post had missed the point that I was criticising the way that I felt new members were being ignored (particularly as the discussion was about refunding the Labour Party)and not, as some seemed to think, about the campaigning prowess of the local party and the dedication of activists, I can only congratulate comrades for the way they have addressed the main issue. Debate at subsequent meetings have, I am told, because due to work I have not been present, treated the issues I raised with a totally commendable seriousness.

I am fairly sure that the reaction to the concerns I raised would not be have been the same in some other Parties I have seen and indeed been part of. Instead, I feel sure that there would have been acrimonious debates and much factional posturing. Not so in Oxford (as far as I know anyway).

Congratulations to Oxford Labour Party for being serious about being the best and most welcoming organisation that it can be. Others could learn a lot from their approach.

The Jazz of Union Organising

2011-07-24T18:07:00.000Z

If you have to ask what jazz is then maybe you will never know what it is? On the other hand everyone seems to know what union organising is. In fact some within our movement seem to have the belief that there is only one way to do do union organising. These true believers in their one way of organising are adamant that only by following their methods of organising can unions successfully build power for working people in the workplace.

The true believers also deride anyone who, in their opinion, does not fully understand the difference between organising and recruitment. Anyone who prioritises recruitment, at any particular time, does so only by going against the faith.

I think the difference between organising and recruitment is very clear. The more power we build in the workplace through our organisation then the more members we get. The more members we get then the more we have to do to make sure that we are organised to ensure the power of our numbers is translated into real gains in the workplace.

So how are two of my real passions, jazz and union organising linked? Well I believe they are linked because there is no one way of playing jazz as there is no one way of union organising. Jazz relies on improvisation by individuals within a structured group approach. It looks at the situation, the particular mood and environment at a moment in time before deciding on the best approach. The approach may change from day to day or from night to night but it all takes place within the discipline of e collective group approach. I remember reading somewhere that if you can't listen or work with others in the group then its impossible to play good jazz. In my humble opinion this is the same as union organising.

I know that some organising fundamentalists will throw the book at me for such herasy but I do not believe there is only one way to organise a workplace nor do I believe that we should stifle the ingenuity or creativity of union organisers to make calls on the ground about how best to win power in a workplace.

I think we should be analysing a workplace and then deciding on the tools we need to organise it by drawing on the wide range of techniques and the organising skills and people available. To me this seems a very reasonable and, indeed, effective way of organising a workplace. In all these senses union organising shares the jazz approach.

Of course the fact that I love jazz and have been listening to some of its legends all day has no influence or bearing on the contents of this post.

Harry Potter and the Tolpuddle Martyrs

2011-07-16T20:29:00.002Z

It was a brand new experience for me today. I'm ashamed to say that I have never been down to Tolpuddle to commemorate/celebrate the trade union martyrs from the small Dorset village who were deported to Australia. Their crime? Trying to organise a trade union!

Part of the weekend experience of the festival is apparently to camp on the site. I don't do camping so there is no prospect of me (or thankfully Kate) wanting to partake of this particular delight (?). The rain, wind and cold that followed us all the way on the drive from Oxford down to Tolpuddle merely served to confirm my prejudice against camping. Having said this I have to say that I have really been missing something all these years in never having enjoyed this festival. It's a fantastic experience!

Lots of trade unionists gathered together to freely debate the key issues facing the working class and, probably as importantly, to enjoy each other company, was a joy.

I had the great honour of speaking in a debate on the NHS alongside John Healey, the Shadow Health Secretary and a colleague from the Royal College of Midwives (sorry I can't remember her name). My basic message was the same as it always is to any trade union audience on any of the challenges that we face - we must organise.

For some time I have been quoting the great Alice Walker to trade union audiences by reminding everyone that there are no knights in shining armour waiting to come to our rescue but that "we are the ones we have been waiting for!"

I also took the opportunity to remind all those who had camped out the night before that they had missed the first opportunity to see the latest Harry Potter film but that while they were busy getting wet and cold I had indeed done so. I told them that it was a great film and they should see it. There was a key lesson for us from the film in that Harry had to organise collectively to win. If even a wizard had to organise then we certainly have to!

Go see the film! Go to the next Tolpuddle festival! Go out and organise!

That Commuter Look

2011-07-07T06:24:00.001Z

I'm writing this as I travel into work in London by train. We just stopped at Maidenhead where I noticed something very frightening. It was so frightening that I broke off from concentrating on the audiobook I'm listening too in order to write this post.

The frightening thing was the look on the faces of people joining the train. It was a look of complete manic fear that they may not get a seat on the train for the relatively short journey to London. It was "that commuter look".

The fear for me is twofold. Firstly, do I have that look myself? Secondly, please never let me have that all consuming scary look.

I love my job and I hope the commuter look people do too. I wake up before the crack of dawn and can't wait to get my day started. I read of someone the other day who described it as not even wanting to go to sleep because you couldn't wait to get back to work! I hope the look I give out is of a total passion for what I do. I just don't ever want to have that commuter look on the train to work!

(I dare say this made no sense whatsoever if that's the case it's probably as a result of my descent into that certain commuter look)

Why David Sometimes Wins

2011-07-04T07:43:00.003Z

Just started reading a so far excellent book by Marshall Ganz called Why David Sometimes Wins (2009, Oxford University Press). The book looks at leadership, organization and strategy in the Californian Farm Worker Movement.

As you may have gathered, if you regularly read this blog, my twitter (@unisonroger), or my Facebook, I have what would very understatedly be called a passing interest in union organizing. You may have also noticed more than a passing admiration of the legendary organizer Cesar Chavez. This book by Ganz, a key aid of Chavez as well as a former Civil Rights organizer, uses the heroic struggle of farmworkers to tell a deeper story about organizing strategy and tactics.

As soon as I saw this book on the shelf and pulled it down, even before I even opened it's pages, it spoke to me of what we are now faced with as workers. We apparently shouldn't fight because we might inconvenience someone or put the Labour Part (god forbid) on the side of workers in struggle. Indeed resistance is apparently futile anyway because we have the whole might of the State (and the mass media) against us.

Now obviously I threw the thing about the Labour Party in there just because I felt like it but being told that the big and seemingly all powerful should not even be resisted is a common refrain facing trade unionists. In fact it's what we have always faced. It's what folks fighting for progress, whether in the workplace, the Civil Rights Movement, anti colonialism or, of course, against slavery, have always been told.

A number of times, even with right on our side (The Miners Strike of the 1980s), we lose. However, like David against Goliath, we can actually overturn the odds and win because we not only have right on our side but we have developed superior strategy and tactics using the biggest and most potent strength we have - our ability to organise.

I have a firm belief that our courage and ability to organise are our most potent weapons. How do I know this? Because it always has been!

Hello Again!

2011-06-23T04:46:00.001Z

Glad that my recent post about my experience at Oxford Labour Party obviously got a bit of a read. Clearly it's doing the rounds in Oxford Labour Party and elsewhere.

I don't have a problem with any of the hard working volunteers in the Oxford Party. Oxford has clearly been a very successful electoral machine in re-electing Andrew Smith who I know is a very good MP. None of that was the point I was making!

My point was to try and say what it felt like as someone who was effectively turning up as a new member. Not sure how it can be harsh to share what happened (or didn't happen) to me at the meeting? Surely that's good as we try to make our party better and more accessible? I don't know how many people turn up once and never return? I do know that's a huge problem in the trade union movement and one that my colleagues and I are desperate to tackle. I'm guessing it's also a concern to many in our Party?

I feel certain that there will be more thought given to what some might call "the new member experience" in Oxford. That means the blog post did it's job in a very small way.

Will I go back to another meeting and help with member contact. I dare say I will do both in between continuing to try to help organise UNISON members in the fight for their jobs, pay, pensions and of course the very existence of public services. A fight, incidentally, that some senior bods in the Labour Party could do more to support rather than hinder.

The Striking thing about Pensions

2011-06-15T19:50:00.000Z

A number of public service unions have now taken the decision to strike in late June to preserve their pensions. As always the decision by these workers was not taken lightly. Its always difficult to take the decision to take strike action. Strikes happen because industrial relations break down and a dispute is created. It is never the first course of action.

Members of the Public and Commercial Services Union, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers and the National Union of Teachers have decided that the attacks on their pensions entitlement warrants industrial action at the end of June. Many other unions, including UNISON, are on the road to industrial action later this year. The action for June is therefore an important stepping stone for what is likely to be more sustained action later this year.

Its not too late for this coalition government to step back from their latest attack on the public sector with their targetting of pension rights. They can choose to take the route of honouring the pension entitlements of public sector workers. Sadly its unlikely that they will do that. This is a cold and calculated attempt by the Government to make the privatisation of public services cheaper for their mates when they come calling to take over our services. This is all about helping their friends to make a profit from the delivery of public services. Thats the real reason behind this attack on our pensions.

The more workers that become aware of the fact that they are going to be asked to pay 50 per cent more and receive 50 per cent less in return from their pensions the more get angry.

Public sector workers do not want to take strike action but increasingly, when they are presented with the facts behind this latest attack, on top of pay freezes, pay cuts, and reductions in other working conditions, are saying enough is enough.

Resistance Way Down South!

2011-06-13T20:29:00.000Z

I had the honour today of spending some time with two sets of striking UNISON workers in Southampton. Firstly, I spent some time on a picket line with very low paid workers at Southampton Hospital. They work for Medirest and endure poor terms and conditions and are simply demanding that the money that they are due from the employer is backdated. Its similar to the dispute I wrote about some time ago in High Wycombe (its the same employer).

After spending some time on the picket line and hopefully successfully showing how much I respected their bravery in standing up for dignity and respect at work I then moved on to join a march through the City Centre to a venue outside the (I think) Civic Centre. It really was an incredible March. More and more on these marches you see the breadth of people who this government and their acolytes in local government are touching with their ideological, reckless and unecessary attack on public services. People in suits marched next to folks in overalls and the comrades from the hospital dispute came over and joined in.

The hospital workers joined workers from the local authority who are on strike against proposals by the Council to cut wages, jobs and terms and conditions. In essence a massive attack on the workforce that was more akin to Victorian times than the supposedly modern times in which we now live.

I had the honour of giving the first speech and was followed by my former colleague from the TUC Megan Dobney and colleagues from Unite the union. There was also a speaker from CGIL Lombardy of Italy. The message was the same - this is an attack on working people and we are drawing the line not because anyone loves being on strike but because there is only so much people can take. Its just no use a bunch of privileged (mainly men) sitting in Cabinet and deciding that already low paid people should take the blame for the misadventures of other privileged (and very rich) folks. The line in the sand just has to be drawn somewhere.

I was very honoured to be with those brave and determined workers today. Their bravery and determination needed to be seen to be believed. My final words to that rally was "let the word go out from this place that the people of Southampton are resisting the onslaught and that its a lesson for us all".

Hello! I Just Got to Let You Know.... You're Welcome!

2011-06-12T13:53:00.001Z

I hope that you get a sense from the postings on this blog that I am very active politically. What I must confess is that I have not attended a local Labour Party meeting in some considerable time. In fact I have not attended a single local meeting since moving to Oxford some 8 or 9 years ago. I thought on Friday it was time to nudge a single and get along to my first meeting.

By way of background and (part) justification I should just say that my schedule at work has often meant that attending evening meetings after work was just not possible. During most of the time I have lived in Oxford I have worked in the West Midlands so I have just been too tired or its been too late when I have got home to go to try to go to another meeting. I say "try" to go to another meeting because, to be honest, it seems to me, that if you wanted to attend a Labour Party meeting in Oxford you have to be blessed with either some mystical power to know where and when the meetings take place or be fortunate enough to be in the right Oxford networks. I'm sorry to disappoint you but I, unfortunately, do not enjoy either of these gifts.

In recent times Kate, my partner in life, has got politically active again and has begun to attend Labour Party meetings in Oxford. This has predominantly been through her involvement with the Womens Section and her new found friendship with Bev Clack (see the blog below this one). The great thing about this is that Kate has now entered the networks where she gets to know when the meetings take place. This meant that on Friday I thought "push a quick single" and break your duck - get along to the Labour Party meeting with Kate and Bev. Sorry - too many cricket analogies!

Before I go on I should say that my view of Oxford Labour Party was soured severely a few years ago when, as a party member I hoped (expected) to get a vote for who our parliamentary candidate would be in the General Election. Instead I simply received a message, although I'm not sure how they got my email saying that some bloke (sorry I cant remember his name) had been selected. I sent a reply back asking what happened to my vote. I received a reply saying, basically, sorry but I should be pleased that we (?) had selected a really good candidate! To say I was pissed off would be more than a slight understatement.

Anyway, I got to the meeting last Friday, the venue wonderfully described by Bev (below) only knowing my two companions although recognising three other people in the room. One person I recognised was the MP for Oxford East, Andrew Smith, who never said hello. Another was someone who I had met some years ago when he, Pete Willsman, was on the Standing Orders Committee (SOC) of the Labour Party. I remember voting for him a few times as a standard bearer of the left on the SOC. The third person I recognised was a UNISON member Ann Black who was, I knew, a former Chair of the Party nationally. You might remember her as the person who read out the party leadership election results and announced Ed Milliband as the winner. Whilst I knew Andrew and Pete would not remember me, even though we had met more than a few times, Ann had fairly recently sat in the front row through one of my (rather loud) speeches in UNISON and, being, as she frequently said during the meeting, one of our activists and about to attend our National Delegate Conference, and presumably a reader of our union magazines, she probably knew me to enough to come over and say hello. Not a bit of it.

Now, contrary to belief in some quarters, I'm not arrogant enough to think that everybody should know who I am and that it should make the slightest bit of difference. Rather I was really pissed off that other than two other people who Kate introduced me too not one other person in a room of about 40 bothered to even try to make me (as a new to them member) the remotest bit welcome. Also to this day I do not know the name of the chair of the meeting because she didnt bother to introduce herself. Now I hear you say "how in the world (or words to that effect) would anyone know (or care) that you were in the room". Well the answer to that is that there were precisely 3 black people in the room and I was not hard to miss. A six foot bald black man dressed in black at a Labour Party in Oxford is not hard to miss.

The irony of all this is that the "special" discussion at the meeting was about refounding the Labour Party. One of the questions we had to look at was how can we get more new members to take an active role. Here are just three suggestions of the top of my head that might help:

Say hello and welcome to a new (to you) member (I appreciate this might be a bit radical for some- after all this might be someone coming to trash your cosy Friday evening meeting).
Don't patronise the new member as one particular person tried to do to me (and then ran off to the other side of the room when I fronted her up)
Talk about things that matter and do not appear to be contemplating your belly button. I say this because what amounted to a thoroughly self-indulgent discussion while having no debate whatsover about the catastrophe facing public service workers and the services they try to deliver (NHS, Southern Cross, Local Government) does seem to be to be fiddling while Rome burns.

Other than that it was nice to go along to a Party meeting again and I would advise you all to do so if you have not done so for a while. Maybe its us that need to grasp the initiative and inject a serious dose of reality into what is, after all the party that trade unionists set up. Although, judging by some of the comments on Friday night, not everyonecurrently involved in the Party either cares or wants to keep that link. That, however, is another blog posting.

Refounding Labour: Social Change and the Kingdom of Heaven

2011-06-11T14:20:00.000Z

By Bev Clack

I had a church upbringing and while some might resent such an imposition, over the years I have had reason to be very thankful that I did. It nurtured my delight in debate and argument and it fostered my politics. It’s also provided a useful training for negotiating the doctrines, rituals and sub-committees of the Labour Party. I may be a lapsed Methodist – not as glamorous as being a lapsed Catholic, I’ll admit, but it’s nearly as tenacious - but an ability to sit stoically on hard seats in cold church halls runs through my DNA like ‘Charge Em For Playgrounds’ is written on the heart of ‘Sir’ Edward Lister, former chief of Tory Wandsworth Council and now Boris’ Chief of Staff.

Last night I found myself sitting in such a hall on the kind of chair that I can only assume was left over from the time of the Inquisition, discussing Labour’s ‘Refounding Labour’ initiative for revitalising the party.

I’d been excited about this meeting. A chance to discuss future policies and how to form an agenda that will have voters rushing back to the party in droves.

It didn’t quite work out like that. We talked about the difference between members and supporters, how to cultivate the membership, whether councillors should have more say in developing national policy, the relationship between the party and the unions, what conference should be like…

I’m not sure that this kind of discussion is even of the ‘angels dancing on pinheads’ variety. If anything, I suspect the said angels would have left the pinheads to find somewhere more comfortable for a short nap. For afficianados, this sort of thing may be bread and butter, but for those of us keen to challenge the coalition’s divisive and socially unjust policies, this is not going to cut it.

As a kid I was often frustrated by the church’s tendency to get obsessed with issues of individual piety and internal structures and debates rather than translating the claim that in Christ there is neither slave nor free, rich or poor, male or female into practices that addressed the need for creating a more just and equal society. Talking amongst overselves has always been the Left’s temptation: I’ve got into Twitter in a big way in the last couple of weeks (@bevclack if you've nothing better to do), but it worries me that such a platform might become yet another way of enabling some of us in the Labour party to indulge in this navel-gazing even more.

What Jesus meant when he talked about ‘the Kingdom of Heaven’ has always been hotly debated in the church. Is this a spiritual concept relating to the individual’s inner life and peace? Is it about a better life after death for believers? Or is it a vision of the new, just society that by our actions we can create here-and-now?

For Labour, the last question is vital. Discussing how to get in more members is all very well, but are we creating a party that is the voice of the marginalised and voiceless in society; that is creating a more just society? We need to be out there, campaigning against a government that won’t even countenance nationalising Southern Cross Care Homes (shame on you, Vince Cable), that is gaily giving money to set up nice schools for the middle classes while shutting youth services and decimating library provision. And at the same time we need the boldness of 1945 when we created the health service and the welfare state to lie at the heart of the policies we develop.

The best part of last night’s meeting related directly to this boldness. Local councillors reported that new social and sheltered housing were being built and opened; concrete signs of that new kingdom that is a result of the decisions of the local Labour council. It’s those actions that warm my heart; it’s that kind of vision that gets me to miss The Archers Omnibus to do some doorstepping on a Sunday morning. (Greater love hath no woman than that, let me assure you.)

If we want a vibrant party we could do no better than start by adopting a very simple activity that lies at the heart of successful churches: welcome people in with a smile, cultivate friendships, and place human beings and relationships at the heart of our values and our campaigning. In refounding itself, Labour must model itself as a community committed to creating a more just society for all. At our best we do this, even in the toughest of circumstances. At our worst, we prefer the security of that safe, pietistic party space.

(Read more from Bev Clack at www.theaccidentallabouractivist.com)

Cable car crash lands in Brighton

2011-06-06T19:32:00.000Z

The GMB union will have its own reasons for inviting discredited Con Dem business secretary Vince Cable MP to its annual conference in Brighton today.

However it is difficult to understand why any union would provide a public platform to a Senior Minister - who in the past year has voted for £81 billion public spending cuts - to pontificate on Con Dem plans to tighten up anti union laws if public service unions have the temerity to resist Government attacks on job and pensions? http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jun/05/vince-cable-union-strike-warning

(Courtesy of Unison Active)

Southern Cross..WE TOLD YOU SO

2011-06-03T19:22:00.000Z

The Southern Cross debacle was not one that was unpredictable. In fact it was UNISON that told us all so.

In September 2008 the union published “The Rise of the Public Services Industry” by Paul Gosling examining the wider social and political implications of the so called public services industry. Among its key conclusions was that: -

Public services developed in response to market failure. But the supply of public services through a private public services industry leaves service users dependent on the private sector and vulnerable to market changes.

The increasing privatisation of public service delivery often fails to produce value for money for the public sector or service users. It also increases the government’s financial exposure and the risk of personal catastrophe for vulnerable service users.

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Social Media Experts

2011-06-01T12:54:00.000Z

By clenchner

A few days ago Peter Shankman wrote a provocative post about why one should never hire a “Social Media Expert”. His main point is that

“Social media is just another facet of marketing and customer service. Say it with me. Repeat it until you know it by heart. Bind it as a sign upon your hands and upon thy gates. Social media, by itself, will not help you.”

This was posted on ProgressivExchange and attracted a more than usual amount of attention. A fair number of “social media experts” are on that list. But it’s a fair debate: do we need social media experts in the nonprofit/organizing/campaign space? When? How?
Nonprofit and political communication staff can’t be assumed to know when or how to use social media, online ads, online video, a microsite, or any other kind of nontraditional, digital strategy. I’ve met them. Here are four typical responses from insufficiently skilled communicators:

Hire a trusted consulting firm (who might be clueless as well) and pay them loads of money for advice one could have Googled and execution that a junior staffer could have done – for a whole lot less.
Reject unfamiliar methodologies.
Encourage staff to present digital strategies, but then reject them, so they can take credit for internal crowd-sourcing while still following (2) above.
Read up on the literature and try their best, but since they only have 100 hours doing this ‘stuff’ they combine relative ignorance with alpha male self-confidence, wasting time and money as they themselves seek to master digital strategy on the fly, ensuring that the organization only advances as fast as they can acquire new skills and insights. (In other words, slowly and inefficiently!)

None of these four options are indefensible. They just aren’t as good as what real leaders do. Here are the alternatives:

Look for a consulting firm or consultant who really has expertise in digital strategy, and learn how to tell the difference between those who get this field and those that don’t, between the traditional strategic PR and media consulting and the Fission/Rad Campaigns of the world. It ain’t the same thing, not by a long shot.
Cultivate a digital strategist internally from your board or a staff member and cede power to them over their areas of expertise. Acquirethe skill of managing an expert, as you would with an attorney or accountant, instead of arrogantly deciding to become that kind of expert yourself. (Arrogant = because you aren’t actually doing to spend the time it takes.)
Crowdsource questions about strategy only if you or someone else in the room has the expertise to evaluate them properly. Absent that element, why waste everyone’s time?
By all means, build your own expertise in digital strategy. Just try and remember the 10,000 hours rule. Someone who has spent five years doing this will know more than you. And after five years, they will have ten years, so even if you changed your career to become a digital strategist, they still might have something to teach you. Be humble and aware of your core competencies, use experts – including social media consultants – judiciously. Don’t force your entire organization to be as slow as you might be.

After sending a version of this response to the list, a bunch of folks wrote to me appreciating how these approaches are laid out. What do you think?

Care privatisation - time to call a halt

2011-06-01T12:49:00.000Z

The revelations in last night's Panorama of abuse at a private residential unit has shocked the nation and rightly led to police arrests. Whilst this was a particularly shocking episode, concerns over care provision have rarely been out of the news in recent months. A UNISON Scotland blog post this morning from Dave Watson catalogues other examples and says, "It is surely time to call a halt to privatisation and undertake a detailed review of the future of care". http://unison-scotland.blogspot.com/2011/06/care-privatisation-time-for-change.html See also Britain’s Private Care 'faces crisis’ - FT

Union: there’s an app for that

2011-05-31T11:51:00.000Z

By Walton Pantland

It’s time for a trade union smart phone app.
Unions are falling over themselves in a belated attempt to get some of the networked benefit that has accrued to participants in the student protests and the Arab Spring. Suddenly union branches up and down the country are setting up twitter accounts, and many are also creating blogs and experimenting with other forms of social media to get the message out there. This is all fantastic stuff, but it should have been done years ago.
As usual, unions think they’re being wonderfully innovative; as usual, they are several years behind the curve. Everyone else has been on twitter for years.
It’s time for us to be proactive and move to the next stage.
As this article points out, the Internet as a separate entity is essentially over, as it pervades so many aspects of our lives that we are often no longer conscious of being online. Many of us – including more and more working people – now have smart phones: iPhones, Android and BlackBerry. These phones connect us to webs of data that track our location, recommend restaurants to go to, tell us what’s on at the movies, when our next train is due and where our friends are.
We’re broadcasting constantly without consciously being “on the Internet”. This is only going to increase, so that the distinction between on- and offline becomes even murkier.
It’s time for unions to take that first tentative step into the murky waters of web 3.0 and develop a smart phone app. There’s an app for everything else; why not one for workplace organising and campaigns?
What would a union smart phone app actually do? The more functionality it has, the better – but the more difficult it would be to build.
A simple app would provide updates from the union, relevant to the sector you work in or your particular interests. This would include some data on your rights at work, press releases, solidarity alerts, calls to action and campaign information, and the ability to easily share and integrate with services like Facebook and twitter. An app like this would be very easy to build, as most of it could be pulled together using RSS feeds.
A more useful app would provide much more relevant information:

Who is my shop steward, health and safety rep, or union learning rep?
Can I contact them directly from the app?
Who is my full time officer?
Where’s the nearest union office, and how do I contact them?
How can I find some one from the union who specialises in equalities, or green workplaces or whatever other specialist query I have?
How can I coordinate my union benefits package?
Does the union have a recognition agreement with my company? When was the last pay deal negotiated, and what was the settlement? When is the deal back on the table, and what are the timescales for consulting on it?
When is the next branch meeting?
How can I get more involved in my union?

It would be fantastic, too, if there was away to communicate with other members – particularly those in your branch – through the app. This would enable people to share views on union issues, and ultimately build more participation and cohesion. As this important article argues, we need strong and dynamic networks to create a community of activism and build a fairer future.
An app like this would be a lot more complicated to pull together because it would have to communicate with the union’s membership database, with membership details verified over a secure connection – after all, some of the information is sensitive. It would probably be more practical to build a separate database to serve the app, but this would still mean exporting a significant amount of data from the membership system, which is likely to make admins and lawyers jumpy. But since some banks are able to develop banking apps, this shouldn’t be beyond the realms of human possibility.
A good first step would be to beef up online “My union” sections of the main union website, where members can log in and manage their own details, and then sync this with the app.
An even more sophisticated app would be one aimed at accredited reps: in addition to the functionality outlined above, it could include:

Bargaining indicators and advice
What’s the RPI and CPI? How do I build an argument for a pay rise around this?
How is my employer doing financially?
What have average settlements looked like across the economy? What about my sector?
Have any settlements bucked the trend and provided unusually good results? What were the key factors in achieving this?
A handy reference to labour law
A guide to discipline and grievance procedures

This would require union research departments creating up to date, relevant content – but it could make a real difference to the bargaining power of union activists.
Are you a smart phone user? What would you like to see from a union app?
Any union devs out there with ideas they’d like to implement?

Using online surveys for union organising

2011-05-31T11:40:00.000Z

By Walton Pantland

One of the most useful organising tools for unions is online surveys. These allow you to find out exactly what members and potential members want, and to focus your campaigns accordingly.
I have worked with organisers and used online surveys extensively. We use Survey Monkey, but there are other survey tools which are equally good. Most – including Survey Monkey – use a Freemium model, which means a basic account is free. This is great for experimenting, but if you plan to do any serious organising I’d recommend a paid for account. Survey Monkey provides really good features, has good support and substantial documentation in the form of an easy to use manual.
So: how do you do it? The most challenging part is getting the survey out there. Like any organising campaign, you generally need people on the inside who can help. In the past, we’ve had building security guards email a link to everyone in a building, or we’ve posted a short URL on a noticeboard (“Tell us what you think of working at Acme Widgets: take the anonymous union survey”). We’ve also created Facebook groups for workers wanting to unionise, and posted the link in there. Data in Facebook is not secure, but the survey data is.
Sometimes we’ve resorted to handing out paper surveys outside the workplace, and entered the responses by hand. It’s worth doing this, because of Survey Monkey’s analytical tools: Survey Monkey allows you to analyse date quickly and accurately and draw off charts. For example, I am running a survey at the moment, asking trade union activists about how they use new technology (if you haven’t already done so, please take it).
The chart below gives a very quick and easy overview of the responses to one of the question I asked:

In organising campaigns, we’ve asked specific information about local issues. We also always ask “Are you prepared to help with the campaign”, and give people options ranging from “Yes, I’ll help hand out leaflets” to “I’d like to be a rep”. We have recruited a number of new reps this way.
For instance, in a recent campaign in the finance sector, we received almost 3,000 survey responses. A number of the questions were related to targets, and respondents had this to say:

This tells us workers see this as a serious issue, and so it becomes a useful campaigning focus.
Open questions also allow you to uncover smaller, local issues that you might not have known about. For instance, for some people the biggest issue is that there’s no microwave in the kitchen, or that their train gets them to work either 5 minutes late or half an hour early. Often, these are issues that are really easy to solve, and it creates the impression of a dynamic and effective union that listens to all its members concerns.
Survey Monkey’s reporting is also very handy for negotiations, as the format looks professional. You can go to the table with survey data on what workers think, and employers often take this seriously.
For a much simpler tool, but one that can be equally effective in the right circumstances, have a look at Union Wheels. This is great if you’re trying to organise your own workplace, and you don’t feel you can do so openly. It allows you to use a simple, anonymous survey to assess whether your colleagues want to unionise too.
The best thing about surveys is that it gives us information about what our members want. Instead of making assumptions about what the important issues are, we can actually ask them, and address them consistently. The best recruitment tool is an effective union. By listening to members, we can deliver real change in the workplace.

Government robs north to pay the south - New Homes Bonus is big con

2011-05-31T09:28:00.000Z

The Government’s New Homes Bonus, trumpeted as a boost to local economies, is a big con, warns UNISON. There is no new money - the scheme just strips cash from existing grants and penalises councils in the north of England. The Government does not have the money to pay for the New Homes Bonus scheme, so is ripping £176m out of the Formula Grant next year - money councils already get - to pay for it.

Formula Grant is the main source of government funding for councils and they can choose how to spend it. Government plans show that every year for the following four years another £230m will be stripped out of the Formula Grant to fund the New Homes Bonus.

How much a council gets from the Bonus depends on how many new homes are built the previous year, with huge differences in winners and losers created across the country.

Shire district councils gain, but urban areas lose out, including every council in the Northern region, except Stockton-on-Tees. Regionally, the North, North West, West Midlands and Yorkshire and Humberside are losers. Knowsley gets just 5p back for every £1 it loses in Formula Grant. District councils in the south and east of England will be the main winners in the new scheme, with Uttlesford getting more than £23 back for every £1 it loses in Formula Grant. However, some southern councils lose out, including Hart, High Peak and Gosport, who all get nothing. Dave Prentis, UNISON’s General Secretary, said: “The Government is robbing the north to pay the south and robbing cities to pay the shires. “If they want to push ahead with this New Homes Bonus they should add new money not rip it out of existing budgets that councils rely on to pay for services like home care. This will be another blow for local communities at a time when vital services are being hit. “Areas in the north are being penalised for having a weaker housing market, caused by the recession and because developers can make bigger profits in the south. The Government must rethink this unfair funding scheme.”

Top ten winners (value of New Homes Bonus compared with every £1 taken from Formula Grant)

1. Uttlesford - £23.02 2. Basingstoke and Dean - £20.63 3. South Cambridgeshire - £14.90 4. South Bucks - £14.48 5. Maidstone - £14.23 6. Tonbridge and Malling - £13.70 7. Tewkesbury - £12.88 8. Forest Heath - £12.80 9. Harborough - £12.56 10. South Norfolk - £11.71 Top ten losers (value of New Homes Bonus compared with every £1 taken from Formula Grant)

1. Wirral – £0.17 2. Lancashire - £0.14 3. Blackburn with Darwen - £0.14 4. Cumbria - £0.10 5. Scarborough - £0.07 6. Gateshead - £0.07 7. Knowsley - £0.05 8. High Peak - £0 9. Gosport - £0 10. Hart - £0 Notes to editors: A full breakdown of figures by regions is attached.

Background:

New Homes Bonus The Government says that the New Homes Bonus is designed to ‘create an effective fiscal incentive to encourage local authorities to facilitate housing growth’. Local authorities get an amount equal to the national average for the council tax band on each additional property and it is paid for six years as an unringfenced grant. The Department for Communities and Local Government has allocated nearly £200m to fund the scheme fully in 2011-12. For the following three years of the spending review (2012-13 to 2014-15) it has allocated £250m per annum, with funding beyond these levels coming from the Formula Grant. The provisional 2012/13 local government finance settlement has already removed £176m from the Formula Grant and plans would require £230m further to be removed from the grant each year until 2016/17.

Formula grant This comes with no strings attached and councils can spend it as they see fit. Formula grant is mainly made up of the business rates, which councils collect from their local businesses, as their contribution to the cost of local public services. This is paid into a central pool and redistributed by central Government in the finance settlement. Formula Grant also includes funding from central government, known as ‘Revenue Support Grant’ and money from the Home Office to fund police authorities, called ‘Principal Formula Police Grant’. In 2011/12, the Formula Grant is approximately £29 billion.

(From www.unison.org.uk)

Growth? Tax? Cuts? Which bit are they not getting?

2011-05-30T17:38:00.000Z

As British Chambers of Commerce cuts its growth forecast for the UK economy, the evidence is piling up that cuts are damaging the economy but business and government don't seem to be getting it.

This follows the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) warning that cuts at the Government’s break-neck pace were threatening the recovery. The OECD is not one for usually disagreeing with the Government so their intervention adds even more weight to the argument that, not only are the cuts bad for the country, they are delaying recovery.

More weight came from Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz recently in a speech in Copenhagen.

Austerity measures “don’t work” and prevent countries from creating jobs needed to generate economic growth, he said. “Austerity is an experiment that has been tried before with the same results.”

Cutting budgets in low-growth cycles leads to higher unemployment and hampers recovery. Austerity “doesn’t work, it does not led to more efficient, faster growing economies.”

Stiglitz is also an economic advisor to the Scottish Government. Let's hope they are listening to his advice.

As UNISON has been pointing out all along, healthy public services don’t just benefit people who rely on them, they benefit the whole economy - public and private sector.

It is astonishing that the Government seem surprised that they’ve had to borrow more because of a slump in tax receipts.

Well, if you make lots of people redundant, of course you are going to get less tax and you have to pay more benefits. If you give tax breaks to your rich cronies in big business, of course you get less tax. Which bit don’t they understand?

(From Unison Active 30th May 2011

What the health bill means for hospital trusts – and why it matters

2011-05-29T14:27:00.000Z

Foundation Trusts were a key part of the previous government’s NHS reforms. Labour wanted all hospital trusts (acute and mental health) to become FTs and by last May about half of all hospital trusts had foundation status. All three parties went into the election in favour of FTs and the Conservative and Labour manifestos both had an aspiration that all hospitals would become FTs, but neither gave details nor a timetable. The Liberal Democrat manifesto did not mention Foundation Trusts, and neither did the Coalition Agreement.
Foundation Trusts are public benefit corporations. These are not-for-profit public bodies and differ from other public bodies, like the BBC or universities, by having a membership. Membership is drawn from the public (patients, carers or people living in the area served by the trust) and from staff, and members can stand and vote for FT governors. Foundation Trusts are legally owned by the government and are part of the NHS, but unlike NHS Trusts, FTs are accountable to the independent regulator Monitor. NHS Trusts are accountable to the local Strategic Health Authority and through that to the Department of Health and the Secretary of State for Health.
Foundation Trusts are often described as having “autonomy” or “freedom from the government” but the freedom works both ways: the government is not accountable for the performance of FTs. The argument was that the local population would be represented by the governors on the trust’s governing body and the executive board would be accountable to the governors; patients were supposed to pass complaints to their governors, and not to their local MP. In practice this rarely works and voters still involve their MPs.
Monitor determines whether a trust may become an FT and sets conditions that include balancing the books, meeting healthcare targets, and meeting financial targets like caps on private healthcare income and on borrowing. If an FT breaks these conditions Monitor can replace the management.
The health bill will abolish NHS Trusts on 1 April 2014. A trust that has not achieved FT status by that date will no longer be an NHS provider. A month ago, Health Service Journal reported that the Department of Health had brought in management consultants to advise on 22 trusts thought unlikely to achieve FT status before the deadline. The government has not ruled out privatisation, as happened in Hinchingbrooke.
For those trusts that do achieve FT status the future is not rosy. The role of Monitor is being changed completely. In the future it will be an economic regulator responsible for enforcing competition, and the recently appointed chair, David Bennett, has said that he wants the NHS to behave like a regulated market similar to the electricity supply industry. A month ago Monitor told FTs that rather than making the 4% “efficiency savings” necessary to comply with the government’s aim to save £20bn over 5 years, they have to make 6.5% “savings”.
The Bill will also abolish the current caps on private income and borrowing. With severe cuts coming to the NHS (hospitals will see a 1.5% cut in their income this year), FTs are expected to make up the shortfalls by expanding their private work, which will inevitably lead to a two-tier system. In July last year Lansley announced that FTs would no longer have access to the £5bn NHS capital budget, instead, they would have to borrow from a bank for capital projects like new buildings. The Bill will remove the “asset lock” on FTs meaning that if a trust defaults on its debt repayment a bank could sell off part of the trust.
Much criticism of the health bill has focused on GP commissioning. But these changes to our hospitals pose a threat to the NHS too. The bill must be amended to remove the artificial deadline on trusts becoming FTs, to reinstate trusts’ access to the NHS capital budget, and to protect NHS assets.
Richard Blogger writes about the NHS at Conservative Policies Dissected.

Lansley and Clegg still aren’t listening on the NHS – make them

2011-05-29T14:18:00.000Z

David Babbs is the executive director of 38 Degrees

A couple of Fridays ago, I joined a group of 38 Degrees members in Sheffield who had met up to deliver a copy of our 390,000-strong Save the NHS petition to their local MP, Nick Clegg. 38 Degrees members are organising similar meetings with their MPs up and down the country, as part of our efforts to persuade the government to start listening to the concerns of patients, health charities, and practitioners about their plans to change the NHS.
Nick Clegg was keen to emphasise to us that he was listening. But one thing really concerned many of us. It became clear that earlier in the day, there had been an official “listening event” somewhere in Sheffield.
None of our members, who all had an interest in the issue, had heard anything about it. A volunteer in the 38 Degrees office had rung up the Department of Health just a couple of days earlier asking for details of “listening events” and it hadn’t been mentioned.
It seems to have been one of the public meetings promised as part of the “listening exercise” - but given the time and location were kept secret, it wasn’t exactly easy for the public to attend.
This seems to be the pattern across the country. Most of the “listening exercise” events seem to be invitation-only affairs, with times and locations shrouded in secrecy. John Cryer MP tabled a parliamentary question requesting the times and dates of listening events.
He was told that the times and dates “will be released alongside the NHS Future Forum’s report”, i.e. several weeks after the listening exercise has finished. That’s not much use to those of us who’d have been interested in attending an event and having our concerns listened to.
With such an opaque process, it’s not surprising that a recent You Gov poll funded by 38 Degrees members found that 95% of the public have no idea how to get involved in the “listening exercise”.
When this comes alongside bullish statements from the Secretary of State and the prime minister about their determination to plough ahead in the face of such widespread criticism, it’s not surprising that only one in five think Lansley is genuinely interested in listening. Many more suspect that the “listening exercise” is at best what Dr Hamish Meldrum of the BMA calls ”a political device”, and at worst a sham.

If Andrew Lansley is hoping that he can use the listening exercise as political cover, claiming he’s listened before ploughing on regardless with his so-called reforms, 38 Degrees members are determined to do all we can to stop him. That’s why in the past few days thousands of us have donated almost £90,000 to run adverts in major newspapers challenging Lansley to start listening properly.
That so many people are willing to donate reflects just how high a priority this campaign is to 38 Degrees members. Hundreds of thousands of us voted to make it the number one priority straight after our success in stopping the forest sell-off. Over 390,000 have signed the petition, tens of thousands have emailed their MPs, and 38 Degrees members have already organised dozens of local events across the country.
The level of campaigning by not just 38 Degrees members, but also health charities, patient groups, professional bodies and trade unions reflects just how deep concerns about the direction of Andrew Lansley’s NHS plans are. It is extraordinary that he still likes to claim that this is all just based on misunderstanding, and is a “storm in a teacup”.
The BMA observes:

“It’s rather ironic that on one hand the Secretary of State says his proposals are there to give doctors more say, more involvement, to listen to them and to let them run the service, and yet when we tell them his plans aren’t working, he doesn’t seem to want to hear what we’re saying.”

For a Secretary of State currently presiding over a high-profile listening exercise, Andrew Lansley has yet to convince many of us that listening is really something he’s interested in.
38 Degrees members hope these adverts make more people aware of how they can work together to make their voices heard, and turn up the pressure on the Secretary of State to start genuinely listening, rather than just pretending he is.

No to blood money: Founder's vision for blood service

2011-05-29T13:54:00.000Z

As privatisation of the national blood service still looms, it is worth remembering that the founder of the service did so to ensure blood was donated for the common good, rather than money.

Dr Richard Doll 1912-2005 set up the national blood service, insisting that Britain avoid the American path of paying donors for their blood.

As the joint union online petition tops 50,000, it is clear that the public will not be convinced by the new vague assurances from the health minister until they ‘are turned into a categorical commitment to keep all of this service firmly within the NHS and out of the hands of contractors’. http://www.unison.org.uk/ournhs/news_view.asp?did=12886

Check out the UNISON campaign pages at http://www.unison.org.uk/ournhs/news_view.asp?did=12886

Richard Doll was born on October 28th 1912 in Hampton. He joined the Communist Party in his student years and graduated from St Thomas’ hospital in 1937. His war years were spent in the RAMC, on a hospital ship.

Doll became famous for his joint scientific work on the link with cancer and smoking in a 1950 paper. Doll was a member of the Communist Party until May 1957. He resigned, due to his difference with the conclusions of the CPGB’s commission on Inner-Party Democracy. He and his wife were members of the Norland branch in Kensington at least for most of the 1950s but had probably joined in their youth.

In his later years, Doll was the most influential occupational epidemiologist, working particularly on exposure limits to asbestos. He died on July 24th 2005, aged 92.

(From Unison Active on Saturday 28 May 2011)

What's Going On

2011-05-22T05:45:00.001Z

The struggles taking place across the country is a struggle between the rich and powerful right-wing ideologues and every day hardworking people. The struggle gives every American an opportunity to see how the rich and wealthy view our nation.

The struggles in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and Tennessee, for starters, are not about a few dollars more out of the pockets of working families, or single heads of households or single moms to pay a portion of their health insurance or their retirement, or any of the hard earned benefits workers have gained. This is much deeper; this is an assault on fairness and democracy in the workplace. This is about silencing the voice of public employees first and all workers second.

These struggles and others that will follow are about the right-wing’s effort to turn back the hands of time when workers had no voice in their relationship with their employer. Workers are fighting back and the general public is supporting them in larger numbers day by day. The public believes workers should have a process that gives them a voice in the decisions that affect their work life. These are not complicated concepts and that is why American workers will win this struggle. That is what local and national polls are beginning to show daily.

In a nation where the top one percent (1%) of the people own thirty three percent (33%) of the wealth, and the remaining ninety nine percent (99%) of us must struggle for a share of what’s left. It is not surprising that all over the nation, hard working American families are waking up to what’s happening and joining with working men and women in their fight for fairness and democracy in the workplace.

Forty three years ago at this time, in the streets of Memphis, Tennessee, this same struggle took place as thirteen hundred sanitation men fought for justice, fairness and workplace democracy. They fought for a process that would give them a voice on the job and an opportunity for a better life for themselves and their families. For them, that process was collective bargaining – the process the governors of Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana seek to strip from their workers. In Memphis, Tennessee, the workers won their struggle for fairness, but not without great sacrifice – the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

We must do everything possible to support these workers in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee and wherever their rights are threatened. We must fight with them because they are fighting for all of us.

By Bill Lucy - President of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists.

Survey reveals life in the NHS under the Tories

2011-05-15T07:58:00.000Z

On the day that nurses and the public should be celebrating Nurses Day (12 May), a shocking survey of more that 2,000 nurses and midwives, paints a bleak picture of life in the NHS since the Tories came to power a year ago. The UNISON survey underlines the effect of uncertainty caused by the Health and Social Care Bill and the impact on the frontline of the Government’s demand for £20bn in efficiency savings.

Three quarters of nursing staff said that the number of patients they have treated has gone up, at the same time as 60% reported a drop in staff numbers. This damaging scenario led to a shocking 64% reporting that safety and patient care is being undermined. Staff morale has been hit with only a quarter prepared to recommend nursing as a profession.

The vast majority (78%) said that their employer was making cuts, with over a third reporting redundancies.

Gail Adams, UNISON Head of Nursing, said:

“The results of this damning survey are both sad and shocking. Nurses and midwives see first hand the damage that the Government’s cuts are inflicting on patient care, so it is perhaps not surprising that 65% say they have considered leaving the NHS. However, nurses are clearly angry at the impact on patients, with 57% saying they would be prepared to take industrial action if patient care is compromised.

“The Health and Social Care Bill is a dangerous experiment and must be dropped. NHS staff have always been prepared to move and modernise, but this is the wrong bill, at the wrong time.

“The demand for £20bn in efficiency savings is leading to more patients being cared for by less staff, with trusts forced into making front-line cuts. Some hospitals are now closing wards because of the squeeze on finances and that means patients are waiting longer. This Government is turning the clock back on patient care in the NHS.”

Additional Survey results

· More than a third (36%) of nurses and midwives had experienced redundancies in their organisation.

· 67% said the cuts had adversely affected their health and 69% their family life.

· A massive 88% said that their workload had increased in the last year.

· 81% ranked caring for patients as being the best aspect of their work.

75 years ago ‘They shall not pass’: Fighting back against fascism

2011-05-15T07:54:00.002Z

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the start of organised mass resistance to fascism by the British people. It was in 1936 when hundreds of men and women began making the journey to Spain to join the International Brigades to oppose General Franco’s fascist-backed rebellion.

And in that same year the people of London’s East End stopped Sir Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts from marching through their streets – adopting the slogan used by the defenders of Madrid: "They shall not pass" – "No pasarán".

Many of those who took part in the Battle of Cable Street on 4 October 1936 went on to fight for the Spanish Republic’s democratically elected government during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39.

Created on 22 October 1936, the International Brigades rallied over 35,000 people from more than 50 countries to the anti-fascist cause. Some 2,500 of them came from Britain and Ireland, of whom 527 died in Spain.

Who were these volunteers? Most were ordinary working people: dockers, clerks, miners, print workers, doctors, building workers, seafarers, teachers, factory workers and nurses.

There were those who had taken part in the Battle of Cable Street: young Jewish East Enders such as mechanic Lou Kenton and textile worker David Lomon, who are today two of the very few surviving veterans of the International Brigades.

Some later rose to prominence in the trade union movement, among them Liverpool docker Jack Jones and Thora Silverthorne, the Welsh-born nurse who was working in Reading when the civil war began.

Others, such as the brilliant Cambridge student John Cornford, who died aged 21 in fighting near Córdoba, and Laurie Lee, were poets and writers. A few became military experts: Tom Wintringham, one of the commanders of the British Battalion, and former journalist Hugh Slater were the instigators of the Home Guard during the Second World War.

What they all shared was a conviction that the spread of fascism must be stopped – as did the East Enders who knew that the antisemitic Backshirts had to be prevented from marching though the heart of London’s Jewish community. A large proportion of the volunteers were communists, as their party was at that time in the vanguard of the anti-fascist fight, though many were Labour Party members or had no political affiliation.

As Jack Jones, who was a Labour local councillor when he travelled to Spain, later wrote: "The march had started with Mussolini and had gained terrible momentum with Hitler and was being carried forward by Franco. For most young people there was a feeling of frustration, but some determined to do anything that seemed possible, even if it meant death, to try to stop the spread of fascism… This was fascist progression. It was real and it had to be stopped."

Meanwhile Britain’s Conservative-led government was eager to appease Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Indeed a large part of the ruling class admired Hitler and Mussolini for the way they dealt with their opponents on the left. Those same people detested Spain’s left-of-centre government and its modest programme of social and economic reform.

So the British government supported a hypocritical policy of "non-intervention" in the Spanish Civil War, which meant enforcing an arms embargo on the Spanish Republic and turning a blind eye to the huge military assistance given to Franco by the fascist dictators after he launched his coup attempt on 17 July 1936.

But just as the people of the East End forcibly prevented the police from clearing the way for the Blackshirts to march through their streets, so the International Brigade volunteers defied government threats to prosecute them for enlisting in a foreign war.

For every International Brigade volunteer who clandestinely crossed the Pyrenees there were hundreds of people in Britain who gave money to help the Spanish Republic, who marched in favour of arms for Spain or who cared for the thousands of refugee children who arrived in Britain fleeing Hitler’s and Mussolini’s bombs on Guernica and other Basque towns.

The International Brigaders and their supporters warned that the bombing of Guernica, Barcelona and Madrid would soon mean Nazi bombers over Britain unless fascism was crushed in Spain. They were proved right: five months after the Spanish Civil War ended on 1 April 1939 with victory for the fascists, Britain and Germany were at war.

With only the distant Soviet Union and Mexico willing to supply it with arms, the Spanish Republic was doomed. The cause of freedom in Spain was lost – democracy was not restored until after Franco’s death in 1975 – but the resistance of the Spanish people and the International Brigades crucially checked the advance of fascism in Europe for more than two-and-a-half years.

The International Brigades also showed the world an unprecedented example of international solidarity and selfless commitment to anti-fascism. That is why we remember them today. Fascism in all its many ugly facets – whether antisemitism, militarism, racism, hostility to immigrants, violent authoritarianism, sexism and islamophobia – has not gone away. As Bertolt Brecht warned in 1945: "For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again."

Inspired by the International Brigaders who took the road to Spain via Cable Street, a new generation must say once again: "No pasarán".

Jim Jump
IBMT Secretary
http://www.international-brigades.org.uk/.

The IBMT will hold its annual commemoration at the International Brigade memorial in Jubilee Gardens on London’s South Bank on Saturday 2 July at 1pm. A weekend of events to mark the 75th anniversary of the creation of the International Brigades is being organised in London on 30 September-2 October, coinciding with the commemoration of the Battle of Cable Street. For more details contact: secretary@international-brigades.org.uk

You just gotta laugh!

2011-05-05T19:59:00.000Z

Courtesy of the National Union of Public and General Employees

President Obama Roasts Donald Trump At White House Correspondents' Dinner!

2011-05-02T17:20:00.000Z

UNISON May Day warning to government

2011-05-02T17:02:00.002Z

UNISON General Secretary, Dave Prentis, said:

The Tory/LibDem government’s first anniversary in power has been marked by the shocking news that the NHS will have to make more billions of pounds of so-called “efficiency” savings. So much for the pre-general election claim that the NHS was safe in Tory/Lib Dem hands.

The path from last May is scattered with broken promises and from the casualties of this coalition government’s public spending cuts. The economy is still in intensive care, but the government’s medicine is not working.

We know that worse lies ahead. After the double bank holiday feel-good factor wears off, the reality of austerity Britain will kick back in. For public sector workers and the people who rely on them; for the sick, the vulnerable, the elderly, the jobless and those seeking to better themselves through education, the future is bleak.

Unless this government changes direction, it is heading for industrial turmoil on a massive scale. The government must understand that UNISON will fight tooth and nail to protect and defend public services. And UNISON will ballot one million of its members to strike to protect their pensions. This will not be a token skirmish, but a prolonged and sustained war, because this government has declared war on a huge proportion of the population.

Many have the opportunity in elections this week to let the government know exactly what they think of its handling of the economy. The government would be wise to take note of that verdict.

AFSCME Sanitation Workers Honored at White House, Join “Labor Hall of Fame”

2011-05-02T17:00:00.000Z

Induction ceremony at the U.S. Department of Labor.

Photo Credit: Fred Watkins

The 1,300 sanitation workers who participated in the historic 1968 strike in Memphis, Tenn. – members of AFSCME Local 1733 – were enshrined Friday into the U.S. Department of Labor’s “Labor Hall of Fame.” Eight of the sanitation workers met President Barack Obama at the White House and later attended the induction ceremony before a full house in the Grand Hall of the Department of Labor. One of them, Joe Warren, had celebrated his 90th birthday just the day before arriving in Washington.
The induction of the sanitation workers into the Hall of Fame marks the first time a group of workers has been included for “taking collective action,” said Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis.
Alvin Turner, one of the eight representatives of the strike that brought Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to his last fight for justice, said at the ceremony that Dr. King “didn’t die in vain” when he was assassinated in Memphis, just 12 days before the strike was settled. “If it hadn’t been for Dr. King coming to Memphis, we wouldn’t have won.” Nor would they have won, he added, “if it hadn’t been for unity” of the 1,300 workers themselves.
Turner, who started with the Memphis Sanitation Department in 1958, then turned his remarks to the current battle over collective bargaining throughout the country. “We’ve got a fight coming up now. I can see they’re trying to balance budgets on the backs of poor people… You can bet your bottom dollar on that.”
Solis said the sanitation workers’ stand against injustice “showed your countrymen that there is dignity in all work. You made historic progress not only for public sector employees, but for all workers … and we honor you for bringing about a turning point in the Civil Rights movement in the fight for social and economic justice.”
Among those in attendance at the Labor Department ceremony were AFSCME Pres. Gerald W. McEntee, Sec.-Treas. Lee A. Saunders, Martin Luther King III, and former U.S. Ambassador Andrew Young, who delivered the invocation.

UNISON President joins health worker protest in Belfast

2011-04-21T07:44:00.000Z

A noisy and colourful demonstration lined the middle and sides of the Falls Road in Belfast yesterday as hundreds of UNISON nurses and staff from the Royal Hospital protested against proposed health cuts in Northern Ireland.

UNISON President Angela Lynes praised the workers for their effective protest. Condemning the Northern Ireland budget and the effect it will have on the health service, Angela called for pressure to be put on all the candidates standing in the Assembly elections. “The secret McKinsey report which seeks to destroy the National Health Service as we know it cannot be allowed to survive” she said.

Highlighting the proposed cuts and charges in the report - attending A and E £40.00, attending your GP £15, In-patient charge £15.00 per night, X Rays and Scans £40 minimum charge to name a few – the Branch said it was vital that the community understood the level of threat these proposals represented.

With members in the City hospital contemplating balloting for industrial action over the scale of the cuts Angela praised the members in Northern Ireland for their efforts in protecting public services especially in Education and Health.

UNISON ruling body calls for peaceful solution to conflict in Libya

2011-04-17T18:34:00.002Z

UNISON, the UK’s largest union, has today called for a cessation of military action in Libya, to allow the delivery of much needed humanitarian aid.

A statement from the union’s ruling body – its National Executive Council – said that “The record of the Gadaffi regime and the serious concerns over the safety of civilians in the areas of Libya that supported the revolt against his regime led to the United Nations Security Council resolution establishing the no-fly zone. However, the intervention of NATO forces potentially risks prolonging a civil conflict and a division on Libya, instead of a lasting solution that meets the legitimate aspirations of the Libyan people”.

General Secretary of UNISON, Dave Prentis, said:

“UNISON is calling for a peaceful solution and a cessation of military Action, to enable the unimpeded delivery of humanitarian aid, protection for civilians and a genuine national dialogue on reform.

“The union wholeheartedly condemns the Gaddafi regime’s history of systematic human rights violations, including the promotion of terrorism abroad.”

Memphis Sanitation Workers Remember

2011-04-06T16:19:00.000Z

From Memphis to Madison - The Struggle Continues

2011-04-06T16:17:00.000Z

AFSCME - Martin Luther King Documentary 'I Am A Man' Memphis Sanitation ...

2011-04-06T16:09:00.000Z

The High Value of the Public Sector

2011-03-31T03:45:00.001Z

When I first started writing this column the MG Rover car plant at Longbridge had just closed. The region was in the depths of despair over what could have been a catastrophic economic disaster. Thousands of workers stood to lose their jobs if the supply chain to the plant could not be diversified into new areas or cushioned for a period against the loss of such a major client.

Six thousand people lost their jobs overnight as a direct result of the closure but thousands more were saved by the Government action of bringing together key organisations in the region, including trade unions, to work for the good of the West Midlands. Six years on the region is faced with the threat of thousands of more jobs going, this time from the public sector, but now with no prospect of any kind of Government intervention to soften the blow.

As I write this column, for the final time, I am struck by the difference in the debate over what is fundamentally the same sort of economic crisis facing the region. The difference is the attitude of politicians and others to the public sector. The view from many of these economists seems to be that the public sector does not create wealth or really contributes to the economy.

I believe that public sector workers make an invaluable contribution to the economy not only by the work that they do but also because of the direct economic contribution they make through their spending power, through the organisations they work for as well as the money they spend as individuals. It's a crying shame that the public sector and the workers within it continue to be seen as a drain on society rather than for their valuable contribution.

I have really enjoyed my time writing this column and I hope that you have enjoyed reading it. I'm off to work nationally for UNISON but the West Midlands is where I was born and bred and so I will never really leave. Thanks for the opportunity and good luck to you all.

(This article first appeared in the Birmingham Mail on 30th March 2011)

The economic madness of imposing £9k tuition fees

2011-03-28T19:01:00.000Z

With more and more universities set to charge the maximum £9,000 a year tuition fees, the cost of the government’s policy becomes ever more apparent. Today’s Guardian reports that the fee increase could leave a £1 billion gap in university funding, while a survey by the Times of 40 institutions shows the average tuition fee will be £8,700 – just £300 below the cap.
Figures seen by Left Foot Forward show that, based on an assumed fee loan of £8,700, the additional public spending compared to the Treasury’s £7,500 average fee estimate will be £1.05bn over the spending review period.
Universities minister David Willetts had threatened that if fees average more than £7,500 then they will try and further cut higher education funding, and had said universities will only be able to charge the maximum £9,000 fees in “exceptional circumstances“.
Last October, Left Foot Forward, along with Andrew Harding of the 2me2you blog, looked at how the Browne Review (pdf), which recommended the rise in tuition fees, will end up costing the taxpayer more, that the proposals that were not only unfair but won’t reduce the deficit in the short-term.
As the Higher Education Policy Institute said at the time:

“This analysis makes a mockery of any argument that could be made that suggests that reform of Higher Education funding is necessary or required by a need to save money.
“It does not save money - it costs money, which could be spent more fairly on increasing the core teaching resource. This analysis suggests that Vince Cable has lied to parliament, to the press and to his own party.
“And this analysis casts doubt on the commitment of the coalition to their own stated aim of deficit reduction. This reform is clearly a purely ideological move, attempting to reform Higher Education along market-driven lines with no proven benefits and several clear issues, not least the additional costs to young people.
“And can we really afford it? Apparently so.”

Not only is the government’s tuition fees policy wrong and unnecessary, but it is being incompetently implemented.

(Courtesy of Left Foot Forward.)

UNISON March 26th - Dave Prentis rally speech

2011-03-28T18:52:00.000Z

We are the ones we have been waiting for!

2011-03-20T06:53:00.001Z

Over in the United States right now trade unions are being subjected to massive attacks. In States such as Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, and Florida attempts are being made to remove the right of trade unions to collective bargaining on pay and other terms and conditions of employment such as health and safety and pensions.

Wisconsin is the real vanguard in this assault on workers rights. The recently elected governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, gave no indication to the electorate that he was planning to introduce such radical proposals in a State that was one of the first in their nation to recognize public service trade unionism. This sounds erringly familiar when you consider that we also have politicians in this country who seem to think its ok to conceal their wildest plans from the electorate before an election. For us we can point firstly to the raising of student fees and now to the proposals for the wholescale privatisation of the NHS.

What we also share in common with the US is widespread resistance to not only the proposals themselves but also the way that some politicians have obviously adopted the tactic of deceiving the electorate in the knowledge that their wilder plans would not be supported. Just last weekend the US witnessed its largest ever labour movement demonstration. Nearly 200,000 people, demonstrated in Madison, Wisconsin against the proposed new law. This followed weeks of demonstrations and an occupation of the capitol building.

Week after week in villages, towns and cities across the West Midlands, and in other parts of the UK, people are standing up against public sector cuts and the contempt that they feel some politicians have for them. At the end of this Month, in London, we are also likely to see the largest trade union organised demonstration in our history.

What is for certain is that on both sides of the Atlantic people have realized that there is no knight in shining armour waiting to come to our rescue. We have to organise ourselves. We are the ones we have been waiting for.

(This article first appeared in the Birmingham Mail on 16 March 2011)

March for public services on 26 March 2011. Join us on the
TUC demo in London. Go to http://www.unison.org.uk/26march
for more information and to register your interest.

Government will use Hutton report to raid public sector pensions

2011-03-10T18:07:00.002Z

UNISON chief, Dave Prentis, is warning that the Government will use today’s Hutton report as a Trojan horse to raid the pensions of millions of public sector workers. The union is sending out a message to its 1.4m members warning that industrial action is now one step closer.

Dave Prentis, said:

“Whatever the Hutton report may say about fairness, the Government will use it as a Trojan horse to raid the pensions of hard working public sector workers. Pensions that our members have paid into year in year out and which are fair and affordable.

“In fact, even before the report today, the Government announced they were increasing employee contributions by 50%. “There is a lot of nonsense talked about public sector pensions – they are not gold plated. The average is very low -in local government, the average is just over £4,000, falling to £2,800 for women.

“Asking workers to work longer for less is simply not an option. We want to talk to the Government about their response as a matter of urgency. But I am sending out a clear message to our 1.4 million members warning them that industrial action is now one big step closer

There is a lot of misinformation about public sector pension schemes. The facts are:

*The local government and NHS pension schemes were renegotiated in 2006 to make them sustainable and affordable.

* Both schemes are cash rich – more is going in than coming out.

* Last year, the NHS scheme received £2billion more in contributions than it paid out and this money went straight to the Treasury.

* The average pension in public service pension schemes is very low, for example in local government, the average is just over £4,000, falling to £2,800 for women.

* If these people didn’t save for their retirement, they would have to rely on *means-tested benefits paid for by the taxpayer.

* Pensioners are already being hit with the move from RPI to CPI to calculate annual inflation increases - this will reduce their value by 15%.

* When the NHS scheme was renegotiated, protection was built in for current members to retain their retirement age of 60. New members have a retirement age of 65. If that agreement is broken, industrial action could follow.

* Government cuts to local government employers grants mean that the shortfall in pension contributions has to be made up by employees. They may have to pay between 50% and 100% more for a reduced pension. This is effectively a tax on low paid workers.

* Studies have shown that if the contributions rise too much, workers will desert the local government scheme and it could collapse.

* The local government scheme invests more than £100billion in the UK economy. If the scheme collapsed, it would have a devastating impact on the economy.

'America is not broke': Moore backs Wisconsin workers

2011-03-10T18:05:00.002Z

"America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It's just that it's not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich", Michael Moore told 50,000 protestors in Wisconsin on Saturday. See the video here.

As the Daily Page reports,"Moore delivered a rousing speech full of invective toward the ruling class. There was nothing surprising about that. What was surprising is that his speech was received, seemingly from every quarter of the crowd -- estimated from the podium at 50,000 and by police as "tens of thousands" -- with thunderous applause."

And in an open letter Moore praised the fight against Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker's attempts to eliminate almost all collective bargaining rights for most public workers as well as slash their pay and benefits. For 16 days trade unionists, including police and fire workers, had occupied the Wisconsin state Capitol building in protest, winning huge public support.

"I can't express enough the level of admiration I have for the people of Wisconsin who, for three weeks, have braved the brutal winter cold and taken over their state Capitol. All told, literally hundreds of thousands of people have made their way to Madison to make their voices heard", he said.

The state Senate has not been able to vote on Walker's bill because 14 Democratic senators left the state in protest, meaning there can be no quorum for the vote.

Read a report on the campaign from a UNISONActive reader in the USA here http://unisonactive.blogspot.com/2011/02/massive-public-sector-cuts-and-threats.html

Public Sector Pensions: Hutton Dressed as Cameron

2011-03-10T18:03:00.000Z

UNISON has strongly condemned the proposals of the so called Independent Public Service Pensions Commission chaired by ex Labour minister John Huttton: http://www.unison.org.uk/asppresspack/pressrelease_view.asp?id=2212

Hutton proposes increasing worker contributions and raising of the retirement age for all public service workers thus repudiating the agreement reached between Government and Unions in 2005:
http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/indreview_johnhutton_pensions.htm

As Dave Prentis pointed out this morning on Radio 4's Today programme, the Coalition Government has treated the Commission with contempt - pre empting its findings on increased contributions with an announcement of a 50% increase in last October's Spending Review.

UNISON must now focus on engaging our membership in a campaign to defend Pensions with the following objectives:

· To ensure there are no detrimental changes to member’s pensions schemes, particularly the NHSPS and LGPS

· To influence government and pension fund stakeholders to understand the real impact of short term changes

· To ensure that UNISON structures and members gain a greater understanding of member pension schemes – to end the fog of pension jargon

· To ensure that UNISON structures are utilised so that members are fully consulted and prepared to defend their pension schemes against detrimental changes

· To ensure the campaign is incorporated into the overarching Defending Public Services and utilising the Million Voices campaign

Pickles in a Pickle over 43 Spin Doctors!

2011-03-09T20:18:00.000Z

Eric Pickles is fond of his attacks on town hall workers, standing in judgement of those public servants he regards as being in non-jobs. But before he denigrates those making a real difference in their communities, maybe Eric should think about the beam in his own eye.
Pickles’ glass-and-steel Department for Communities and Local Government employs no less than 2,100 staff, not one of which can be described as a front line role .Despite attacks on local government spin, Pickles himself keeps a whopping 43 press officers on the payroll, presumably to maintain the fiction in the right wing press that it is local government with too many non-jobs.
Other members of Pickle’s senior team include the Deputy Director for the Big Society, who adds value by “leading on the corporate secretariat and performance”. Meanwhile the Deputy Director for Knowledge Management is busy with the “provision of records management”, also known as, erm, filing. Overall, Pickles has 111 Directors and Deputy Directors, all on £65K+ and many of them earning far more than the PM.
Eric’s administrative budget alone is £262m, far greater than Manchester’s entire adult social care provision. And despite all their talk of cut-backs, the Ministers and their staff are still spending over 10 grand a month on vehicle hire from the much-bullied Government Limo Service.
If any out-of-work council staff are reading, there’s a vacancy for “Deputy Director of Marketing and Channels” , in charge of critical national matters like the CLG

(Courtesy of Left Foot Forward)

Milburn rejects offer to be candidate for chair of NHS Commissioning Board

2011-03-09T20:13:00.002Z

Share23

7 retweet

Embattled health secretary Andrew Lansley suffered a further blow today with the news former Labour health secretary Alan Milburn has rejected his personal request to become a candidate for the chair of the NHS Commissioning Board. In August, Milburn was appointed the coalition’s ‘social mobility tsar‘ to much fanfare, an appointment described as “quite a coup” for the prime minister; today’s news, however, has hardly been reported at all.
Only industry publication Health Service Journal has reported (£):

“Mr Milburn, heath secretary between 1999 and 2003, was personally asked by Health Secretary Andrew Lansley to join the competition for the post. Both the offer and Mr Milburn’s refusal came within the last few weeks…
“Last year Mr Milburn agreed to be an adviser to the coalition government on social mobility, signalling his willingness to work across political boundaries. However, senior sources close to the reform process suggested Mr Milburn may have rejected this offer because the likely political row posed too great a risk given the uncertain outcome of the selection process.
“However, Mr Milburn did express significant concern about the reforms at last week’s Nuffield Trust summit.
“He said that some elements of the coalition’s plans were “instantly recognisable” as a continuation of the reforms he oversaw. However, he claimed to be “mystified” by the “presentation” of the government’s programme and the lack of “advocacy and advocates” for the changes.
““I don’t understand the politics”, he said.”

Yesterday, Dr Mark Porter, chairman of the British Medical Association, warned that the government’s NHS reforms risked a return to the 1930s, and warned against turning the service into “an increasingly tattered safety net”.
He said:

“Very deliberately the government wishes to turn back the clock to the 1930s and 1940s, when there were private, charitable and co-operative providers of healthcare.
“But that system failed to provide comprehensive and universal service for the citizens of this country. That’s why health was nationalised. But they’re proposing to go back to the days before the NHS.”

We are Winning the Arguments

2011-03-09T20:09:00.000Z

Since the election, polling company YouGov has been regularly asking the same questions about the cuts. While they are not quite the questions that we would ask, they are still useful. Asking the same question allows us to see how public opinion moves over time.
The government started off wanting voters to think that the cuts are:

being implemented in a fair way: "we're all in this together"
confined to "waste" and back-office services
the route to economic recovery; and
inevitable: "we've maxed out the nation's credit card bill and now have to pay it off".

Straight after the election they were winning these arguments. But public opinion has now moved decisively.

Cuts are unfair

This chart shows how many people think the cuts are unfair. Immediately after the election only one in three said they were unfair. Now that has gone to almost two in three. That is a big shift.

Frontline services

YouGov ask whether you are likely to "suffer directly from cuts in spending on public services such as health, education and welfare". This seems a pretty fair definition of frontline services.
As this chart of those saying yes to this question shows, ministers have never won this argument. From the word go around 70 per cent have expected to suffer from the cuts. It's increased a little perhaps, but it has been remarkably consistent.

Bad for the economy

The government message is that cutting public spending gives room to the private sector to drive an export-led recovery.
This chart reports those who say that the cuts are bad for the economy. It was about one in three before the election, but is now over half. It's not quite as dramatic as the shift in fairness, but is still a big shift.

Too deep and too fast

YouGov have not asked questions about whether people think the cuts are inevitable on a consistent basis, but have now started to ask the questions I would have put from the word go.
We can't put them on a chart therefore, but here are the results from their poll of 20/21 February 2011.
A majority think cuts are necessary.

Necessary	Unnecessary
55%	33%

But before ministers get too pleased, there is little support for their speed and scale (and we already know people think they are unfair).

Too deep	Too shallow	About right
50%	6%	27%

Too quickly	Too slowly	About right
58%	5%	26%

As people start to see the effects of cuts on their local services as council budgets are agreed, it is hard to see these figures moving back to the government.

Posted by: Nigel Stanley on False Economy on 7 March 2011

UCU to Strike over changes to University Pension Scheme

2011-03-09T20:03:00.002Z

The University and College Union (UCU) today announced plans for strike action in Scotland on Thursday 17 March, in Wales on Friday 18 March, in Northern Ireland on Monday 21 March and in England on Tuesday 22 March.

There will then be a second day of strike action across the UK on Thursday 24 March.

Members at institutions that voted for action will be asked to strike against the detrimental proposals from university employers to reduce pension benefits and increase costs even though Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) is in robust health.

The employers plan to bring in the changes to the pension scheme on Friday 1 April. Last week UCU members of the USS pension scheme at 63 universities voted for strike action and action short of a strike.

Taken overall, two-thirds (64.55%) voted for strike action and over four-fifths (82.19%) voted for action short of a strike. http://www.pensionsage.com/pa/63-universities-to-be-hit-with-strikes-over-pensions-this-month.ph

Following the result of the ballot, UCU general secretary, Sally Hunt, wrote to the Employers Pension Forum (EPF) to request urgent talks through the arbitration service, ACAS, to resolve the dispute and avoid the first national strike action in universities for five years. The union has still not had a response from the employers, but said today it remained hopeful of talks and a resolution without the need for action.

UCU general secretary, Sally Hunt, said: "University staff really value their pension rights and have made their views of the detrimental changes crystal clear and if a settlement is not reached, they are prepared to strike to defend their pensions."

2011-03-05T15:59:00.000Z

Organising a coach to London on 26 March? Add it to the map.

The TUC's March for the Alternative will demonstrate the depth and breadth of opposition to the governments deep and rapid spending cuts.
It will bring together those who deliver public services under threat together with those who use them, those whose private sector jobs are threatened by the depressed economy and those who are simply angry at the damage that the cuts are doing to our society.
The TUC march gives everyone involved in opposing cuts the opportunity to come together in a single national moment to share their rejection of the government's argument that there is no alternative.
There is much more detail about the march at the dedicated website www.marchforthealternative.org.uk.
But we also making use of False Economy's mapping tools to use this site for the transport arrangements. The TUC is not organising any transport of its own, although many of its member unions will.
You can use this map to offer spaces in a coach or a train.
And if there is no transport available from your area, then we suggest you use www.pledgebank.com to see if there is demand for a coach from your area.
However you plan to come, please do use the pledge box on the right to tell us you're coming – and why.

Osborne’s export-led recovery: the figures don’t add up

2011-03-05T15:55:00.000Z

George Osborne is hoping that increased exports will keep the economy growing even as government spending cuts and squeezed living standards reduce domestic demand.
The most recent data suggests that not all is going according to plan, with the UK’s trade gap (the difference between what we import and what we export) widening again in December.
But who exactly does the government think is going to start buying UK-made goods and services? Where is this boost in trade going to come from?
George Osborne has previously suggested that exports to China are a solution to Britain’s problems. David Cameron has led high profile trade missions to China and India.
In other words the government likes to talk up the potential for trade with the fast-growing emerging economies – the most important of which are the so-called BRICs (Brazil-Russia-India-China).
The problem ministers face is that while the BRICs might be growing quickly, they make up a very small share of UK trade. To see where much of UK trade is actually going, look to the other acronym popular in global economics: PIIGS (Portugal-Ireland-Italy-Greece-Spain). PIIGS refers to the ‘periphery countries’ of the Eurozone – those with severe economic problems.
This graph (data in this pdf table G1) shows the relative shares of the economically troubled PIIGS and the fast-growing BRICs in UK trade. The PIIGS are three times as important to the UK economy – indeed we export more to Ireland alone than to Brazil, Russia, India and China combined.

David Cameron last week led a controversial trade mission to the Middle East. Total UK exports to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Libya, Iran, Israel, Egypt and Qatar add up to only 4.7% of total exports – again less than Ireland alone!
This focus on fast-growing developing economies is unlikely to have a major impact on exports in the next few years – the years when Osborne needs a pick-up in trade to offset a weak domestic economy. UK trade with China is worth around £5.4bn to the economy. Even if it were to treble over the next four years (extremely unlikely) this would come nowhere near offsetting the £81bn of cuts Osborne is embarking on.
As the FT noted in November:

”The reliance on trade to boost the economy in the future has been a persistent feature of UK forecasts for the past decade – and they have been persistently wrong.”

There is no reason to doubt this will not be the case again.
Duncan Weldon is an economist and blogger.

Defending and advancing public services for equality and peace

2011-03-05T15:51:00.000Z

This year’s International Women’s Day celebrations by Public Services International members are marked by a wide-reaching sense of determination to make swift changes that better the world for women and their families. From Cairo, Egypt to Wisconsin, USA, women and men are on the move, demanding respect for basic rights and freedoms: the right to freedom of expression, the right to join a union, the right to collective bargaining, the right to live in dignity.

Public services – which provide a vital foundation for women’s empowerment and gender equality, and build peaceful, just and sustainable societies – are being cut, privatised and outsourced. Across Europe and North America austerity measures are being introduced under the excuse of reducing budget deficits.
Kuini Lutua, chair of PSI’s World Women’s Committee emphasizes that, “Investment in quality public services is an investment in present and future generations of women, girls and the entire human race. It is an investment in development. It is an investment in democracy. It is in an investment in justice and ultimately an investment for peace.”
“Women are amongst the hardest hit by the cuts to public services,” she says. “It is women who hold more precarious jobs; women who assume a major part of family and social responsibilities; women who live with lower wages or in situations of extreme poverty.”
Lutua notes that there is widespread “anger that women are being made to pay for the policy failures of governments across the world. Anger that ordinary citizens are paying the price for bankers’ greed. Anger at the lack of decent jobs, especially for young people. Anger that hard won victories on gender equality are fast being eroded.”
PSI general secretary Peter Waldorff adds: “Across North Africa and the Middle East, it is the failure of governments to invest in their people, in quality public services, to create decent jobs, to promote equality of opportunity for all, that has led to the growing wave of uprisings. Actions in which women and men, young and old, are standing steadfast in the name of change. Governments across the world must pay attention to these urgent calls for change. The time to invest in people, in quality public services, in equality, is now.”
One hundred years after it was first celebrated, March 8 is now an important date on the global calendar. Thousands of events are held annually throughout the world to celebrate the many achievements and victories of women over the years.
“March 8, 2011 is an opportunity to continue our efforts, our movement, to achieve our demands,” says Lutua.
PSI members in New York for this year’s United Nations Commission on the Status of Women also welcome the message of Michelle Bachelet, head of the new UN agency for gender equality and women’s empowerment who says firmly that “Gender equality must become a lived reality.”
Download and distribute Public Service International’s International Women's Day 2011 poster and brochure:
ENGLISH:

AFSCME Calls for end of demonizing of Public Employees

2011-03-05T15:49:00.000Z

Tuesday, March 2, 2011 — Citing an interview the House Speaker John Boehner gave with the Christian Broadcasting Network, AFSCME Pres. Gerald W. McEntee called on the Speaker to stop using violent metaphors and demonizing public employees.

“John Boehner goes on Christian TV and claims that collective bargaining is ‘a machine gun’ that public employees have put ‘right at the heads’ of public officials,” said McEntee. “Collective bargaining isn’t a weapon, it’s a process that gives workers a voice in finding solutions to problems that exist. We need to pull together as a country, but this kind of language will only tear us farther apart,” McEntee said.

“When either side uses violent imagery and metaphors, we ignore the fact that we’re all in this together,” McEntee said. “Coming only months after a member of the U.S. House was shot in Arizona, I hope the Speaker’s reckless comment was a slip of the tongue and not a talking point. How much better off would we all be if he stayed focused on the urgent task of jobs creation?”

McEntee also urged Boehner to stop distorting the salaries and retiree benefits of public service workers in his public statements.

“The Speaker says that public employee pay and benefits are out of line with other workers. That’s not right and he shouldn’t be spreading falsehoods. The average AFSCME retiree’s pension is $19,000,” McEntee said. “Spreading false information about pay and benefits is just another way of demonizing the men and women who staff 911 centers, teach our children, care for the infirm and plow our streets.”

The Economic Policy Institute found in a recent study that Wisconsin public service workers with a bachelor’s degree or more – which is required for up to 60 percent of the state and local workforce in Wisconsin – are compensated between $20,000 less (if they just have a bachelor’s degree) to more than $82,000 a year less (if they have a professional degree, such as in law or medicine). “Speaker Boehner should stop vilifying public employees,” McEntee said.
Boehner’s interview can be seen at this link: http://blogs.cbn.com/thebrodyfile/archive/2011/03/01/speaker-boehner-to-brody-file-preparing-for-one-giant-fight.aspx

Standing with Wisconsin

2011-03-05T15:46:00.000Z

"We acknowledge the fundamental truth that an injury to one is an injury to all," public service unions in Wisconsin have declared in a letter of thanks to UNISON.

Thanking general secretary Dave Prentis for his letter to Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, the state’s section of the AFL-CIO wrote: "That is why the support you have shown us provides us with such hope and inspiration. We know that together with our union brothers and sisters across the globe, we shall prevail."

The basic union rights of public service workers in the US state are under attack from a Republican state government which is trying to pass a law removing their access to collective bargaining.

Governor Walker wants to remove all collective bargaining rights, except for salary, for around 175,000 public employees starting on 1 July. Local police, fire and the state patrol would be exempt.

Any requests for a salary increase higher than the consumer price index would have to be approved by referendum.

Contracts would be limited to one year and wages would be frozen until the next contract is settled. Public employers would be prohibited from collecting union dues and members of collective bargaining units would not be required to pay dues.

With unions occupying the rotunda of the state Capitol to protest against the plans, Mr Prentis wrote to Governor Walker last month on behalf of UNISON.

He pointed out that collective bargaining is "one of the fundamental pillars in a well-developed democracy, where social dialogue and collective bargaining through trade unions secures constructive relationships between employers and employees."

He urged the Wisconsin leadership "to choose a constructive path and stand by commitments that have already been set out in legally negotiated collective agreements."

Responding to the support, Phillip Neuenfeldt and Stephanie Bloomingdale of the Wisconsin AFL-CIO union centre wrote: "The attack that we are now facing in Wisconsin is part of a larger plot by those who want to create a powerless and compliant workforce. Turning back this tide is not a local or even national challenge."

UNISON international

The AFL-CIO in Wisconsin

Send a message of support to the Wisconsin AFL-CIO at solidarity@wisaflcio.org or email governor Wallace at govgeneral@wisconsin.gov

UNISON Active analysis: Inflation Up Again? That‘ll Be Public Sector Pay Cuts All Round

2011-02-17T18:10:00.000Z

The inflation figures released by the Bank of England on Tuesday are a grim warning for all public sector workers. UNISONActive still believes that the only figure that counts is that for the retail price index, and the RPI has now hit 5.1 %. This figure is the measure of how much the prices of the goods that we all rely on are increasing- the increase in the price of housing, the price of food, the price of energy, the price of transport, whether in the increased costs for petrol or diesel or the increase in the price of public transport.

Mervyn King is only reporting what we already know. Every weekly shop, every train or bus journey, every electricity bill takes more out of the family wage. We really don’t need the official figures to confirm that.
As prices rise however, the reality of Tory policy kicks in for us.

With every rise in inflation, the public sector pay freeze means that our spending power, the money in our pockets is eroded further and further. Remember the saying “ Income 20 shillings, Expenditure 20 shillings and sixpence, result misery”? Except as public sector workers on a pay freeze as inflation rises, the difference between the wages and expenditure is rising steadily with the result that many in work would previously have qualified for benefits, but then they have been slashed as well. Rising inflation lowers our living standards, and certainly weakens demand in the economy.

In a climate where public services are being slashed and jobs cut, worries about job security are naturally at the top of the political agenda. But alongside the cuts agenda Tory strategy for recovery is to increase profitability by intensifying employment insecurity and suppress wage growth – the further redistribution of the social product from labour to capital over the next 5 years is actually set out in some of the Treasury’s recent projections and will have consequences beyond the public sector. The cuts and the wages freeze are part of the same agenda.

While Barclays Bank has announced the rise in average pay at Barclays Capital from £191,000 to £236,000, http://www.channel4.com/news/barclays-cuts-bonuses-as-profits-rise-to-6-1bn Channel 4 news reports the “surprising” news that in Southern England, food banks, supplying free food have found that many of those applying are actually in work. The reporter describes how many in employment face bills that outstretch their income, resulting from decreasing hours of employment, loss of overtime or just simply low wages. http://blogs.channel4.com/gary-gibbon-on-politics/britain-in-2011-people-in-work-cant-feed-themselves/14579

As union members, decisions to fight for wage increases lie in our own hands. Both the NJC for England Wales and Northern Ireland and the SJC for Scotland have submitted pay claims. Health members await the results of the pay review. The crucial question we all have to answer is- when does the price of not fighting for a pay rise become too great?

Our Region can Stay Strong

2011-02-17T10:47:00.000Z

I am sure that I have mentioned several times before that I was born and bred in Walsall. This bond with Walsall, the Black Country and the region as a whole is really important to me. Wherever I have worked and whatever I have done I have always done everything that I can to defend our region against those from outside that seek to belittle or run us down. I have also taken every available opportunity to work for and to sing the praises of our region.

We are a region that has led the way in innovation. Not only were we the cradle of the industrial revolution our region also gave birth to a system of local government in Birmingham that was later to be copied across the World. We have also, over the years, been one of the powerhouses of the labour and trade union movement.

With that in mind it should come as no surprise to anyone that I might get a little bit vexed when folks either try to create divisions between people in this region or, at least in my view, set about the destruction of the economic and social fabric of this place I love. Whether its extremists coming into our region to blame ethnic minorities, of which I am one, for all the ills under the sun or the local politicians that stand in their shiny suits and smile as they cut the services that the people of our already hard pressed region rely on so much, I object.

Raising objections to those that seek to undermine our region is important in itself but not enough. We need to turn our objections into controlled and sustained opposition. It must be an opposition not just based on the negative of being against something that is happening to us but, instead, a positive statement in favour of things that help to hold the fabric of our society together - such as public services.

This is a region that breeds resilient people. There are few other times in our history when that resilience was more needed.

(This article was first published in the Birmingham Mail on 16 February 2011)

Birmingham - Con Dem Flagship Council Declares War on its Workforce

2011-02-15T20:14:00.000Z

The people of Birmingham have the double misfortune of a Con Dem led City Council implementing the anti-democratic cuts agenda of a Con Dem Government. And workers at the UK’s largest local authority are bearing the brunt of ruthless redundancy programme and unilateral changes in terms and conditions of the whole workforce.

Last Friday’s announcement of 7000 job losses over the next four years was followed up yesterday by a Cabinet decision to impose contracts which remove the unsocial hours payments set out in the NJC contract for local authority workers. http://www.birminghammail.net/news/top-stories/2011/02/15/birmingham-city-council-on-collision-course-with-unions-97319-28170155/

UNISON members are now moving towards a branch wide industrial action ballot following on from the protracted and still unresolved dispute in the Council’s refuse collection and street cleaning service.

All in this together

2011-02-02T11:19:00.000Z

I was really proud to join other colleagues from UNISON on a march and rally last Saturday organised by the Communication Workers Union to protest privatisation of the post office. The comparison with what is currently being proposed for local government and the health service is easy for us to make. I tried to get this across in my speech to a packed rally in Birmingham Town Hall. I think its important that workers from across different public services draw the comparisons and stand together for the service and the jobs that make them possible.

The previous day I was doing a radio interview and a caller came on the line and aggressively berated me for saying that public sector workers are being made to pay the price of the so-called austerity budget with their jobs. My point was that this was unfair and clearly public sector workers were about to lose something like half a million jobs. The caller said that private sector workers had already paid the price and that all I ever talked about was public sector workers.

A glance back over the columns I have written for this paper as well as the numerous media interviews I have done will show that I have been clear in talking about the impact of job losses on the whole economy. But its also no surprise that I talk mostly about the public sector, after all, I work for a public service union.

While I think the listener was mistaken in his assertion that I am only concerned about the public sector I do believe his intervention raises an important issue. Whilst its important for public sector workers to stand together against privatisation it is also vital to ensure that everyone remembers the devastation that has hit the private and voluntary sectors during the recession.

What we shouldn’t do is have a race to see which workers have been hit the hardest. All workers have been hit hard while the bankers still get their bonuses. We are the ones who are really in this together.

(This article first appeared in the Birmingham Mail on 2 February 2011)

Change is Possible - if we want it!

2011-01-25T19:51:00.000Z

Some people tell me that there is no point in protesting against changes that those in power want to make. After all, so their argument goes, the people with power in society, even if they don’t always get it right, really do know best. Even if they don’t come out and say those words the inference is that because these people in power went to posh schools, talk better than we do or went to Oxford or Cambridge Universities then they just know things that we do not.

While some of these powerful people may indeed know some things that we mere mortals do not history teaches us that to simply allow them to get away with some of the things they try is simply not the thing to do. Indeed, history also teaches us that resistance to a few powerful people taking decisions against the interests of the many happens much more than might immediately be obvious.

I have just finished reading a book about how small acts of resistance to people in power in all Continents have led to change and, sometimes, been the difference between life and death for thousands of people. My point is not to plug the book, so I won’t. However, what struck me from just about all the stories was that they started by an individual standing up and saying “this is wrong” and, in spite of people told that something was impossible, their stance prevailed.

So it is today that many of us are being told that it’s pointless to argue against some of the changes that this Government is making. After all, we are told, the Government has the votes with its coalition to do pretty much whatever it pleases. Frankly the women reading this paper would not have the vote if some brave women in our history had accepted that view, and Apartheid would still likely be in place in South Africa.

If we think something is wrong then we must protest. That’s what I will be doing as I March through London against this Government on March 26^th.

(This article first appeared in the Birmingham Mail on 19 January 2011)

House of Pleasure

2011-01-18T21:24:00.000Z

The following raised a titter amongst Committee Room visitors when displayed on the official House of Lords announcer screens earlier this evening:

One skill sorely lacking on the Scrapbook team is an Erskine May geek. According to the House of Lords’ Guide for Deputy Speakers and Deputy Chairmen, however:

When the House is to be adjourned during pleasure the motion is moved from the Government Front Bench … When the House sits after an “Adjournment during pleasure”, e.g. when it has sat earlier in the day for judicial business, the mace is already on the Woolsack and the Speaker enters the House from the Prince’s Chamber on the Spiritual side. When he reaches the Woolsack he merely bows to the House and sits on the Woolsack.

So everyone is, erm, clear then?

High inflation will make a tough year for workers even harder, says TUC

2011-01-18T20:54:00.000Z

date: 18 January 2011

Commenting on the latest inflation figures published today (Tuesday) by the Office for National Statistics, which show the Retail Prices Index (RPI) increased to 4.8 per cent in December and the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) rose to 3.7 per cent, TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said:

'The alarming rise in inflation means prices are running well ahead of pay deals. This will make a tough year for workers even harder to bear, particularly for public servants suffering a sharp real terms pay cut.

'Fuelling inflation with a VAT hike will hit workers in their wage packets and shopping receipts. This tax rise is bad for working families and damaging for the economy too.
'Surely it is now time for the Chancellor to use the budget to reconsider the VAT increase.'

NOTES TO EDITORS:

- The latest inflation figures are available at www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/cpi0111.pdf
- All TUC press releases can be found at www.tuc.org.uk

Government must come clean on £40 million bill to taxpayers

2011-01-18T20:50:00.002Z

18/01/2011

On the day that UNISON members are protesting over the abolition of the education maintenance allowance (EMA), UNISON is calling for the Government to come clean on the huge cost of cancelling the £68 million Capita contract that runs the scheme.

As MPs prepare to vote tomorrow (19 January) on cutting the EMA, the UK’s largest union is demanding that the penalty charges, redundancies and other hidden costs of cancelling the Capita contract, are revealed, as this could cost taxpayers up to £40 million.

The union is backing Nick Dakin MP’s letter to parliament requesting information on how much the government will pay towards canceling the Capita contract.

Dave Prentis, UNISON’s General Secretary, said:

“Cameron must come clean on the hidden costs of cutting the EMA. The government says it is forced to withdraw this vital support from the most disadvantaged young people, yet the cost of severing the contract with Capita two years early, could cost up to £40 million in penalty charges.

“Hundreds of thousands of students receive this vital support but 70% of them may be forced to drop out of their courses if it is removed in the summer. The trail of destruction from abolishing the EMA could also lead to redundancies at Capita.

“The government must rethink their attack on the educational opportunities of young people.”

Ends

In the Spirit of Martin Luther King Jr., SEIU Locals Celebrate and Speak Out

2011-01-18T20:47:00.000Z

By Rachel Larris

Each year we celebrate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in many different ways. Some honor his spirit of generosity and work towards peace; others continue his legacy in calling attention to injustice.
Here's a look at what some SEIU members are doing to honor the work of Dr. King while continuing the spirit of his work to improve the lives of others.

SEIU 775NW Leads Rally in Port Angeles, Washington to Speak Out for Jobs, Justice and Peace
On Saturday a coalition of groups, including members of SEIU Local 775NW, Stop the Checkpoints, the Clallam Green Party, Olympic Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship, Veterans for Peace, Port Angeles Radical Women and others will lead a rally and a vigil in Port Angeles, Washington.
The rally "Speak Out for Jobs, Justice and Peace," will be held in memory of Dr. King and will be followed by speakers who will talk about the important issues workers and others still face including the recent cuts to state social services.
Syracuse 1199ers Help 10th Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Food and Clothing Drive
The United Way of Central New York, along with the Greater Syracuse Labor Council and 1199SEIU, is hosting the 10th Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Food and Clothing Drive, which began January 1 and will run through Martin Luther King Jr. Day, January 17. The drive is collecting gently-used clothing for men, women, and children, and non-perishable food to give to Syracuse's most needy families. For the first time this year, they are also collecting school supplies that will be delivered to local schools. The drive will culminate in a Day of Action on January 17 in Syracuse, New York.
And in Rochester, New York, 1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers East is continuing to host one of Rochester's oldest continuous recognitions of Dr. King's birthday. Free and open to the public, the event will feature song, dance poetry and a speech "Where Do We Go From Here" by Executive Vice-president for 1199 SEIU Hudson Valley and Capital Region, Yvonne Armstrong.
SEIU Local 521 Marches in Fresno, and a Festival in Burlingame
Members of Local 521 have a series of events planned this weekend culminating in a march and commemoration program in Fresno, California. The march begins with a food drive to end child hunger. The theme of the events: "Living the Dream, Let Freedom Ring for Love (Let Our Violence End)."
Additionally, the Social & Economic Justice Committee of SEIU 521 is sponsoring the Western Workers Labor Heritage Festival (WWLHF), a weekend of worker solidarity in Burlingame, California. For more than two decades, WWLHF has honored Martin Luther King, Jr.'s contribution to the civil rights and labor movements through culture that connects workers' rights, civil rights, and human rights. The festival uses music, singing, drama, cartoons, spoken word, writing, and emerging technologies to lift people's spirits and hearts and build solidarity.
Public Service Employees Rally for Spectrum Nursing Home Workers on Strike

New England Healthcare Employees Union District 1199 will be rallying in Hartford, Connecticut on Saturday, January 15th, joined by members of members of CSEA/ Local 2001 to show solidarity for their District 1199 brothers and sisters who went on strike April 15.
Nurses, nursing assistants, and elder-care support staff have been unable to reach a contract agreement with their employer, Spectrum Healthcare, and have been subject to unfair labor practices. Workers have been illegally fired and intimidated by Spectrum since their previous contract expired in March of 2009. They are on strike at four facilities in Connecticut.
Members are coming out for this rally to honor nine months of standing up to an employer who is treating their workforce and their clients unfairly -- and celebrate the social and economic justice legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Poll shows Labour 8% ahead but still not winning on economy - Why?

2011-01-11T20:27:00.000Z

John Stevenson

Labour has opened up an eight-point lead over the Conservatives, according to a ComRes survey for The Independent. The figures would give Labour an overall majority of 102 if repeated at the next election. However, Labour has not yet won the key battle on the economy. Why?http://www.comres.co.uk/page1902124918.aspx

Only 36% feel Labour would do a better job on the Economy so the lead may be more about disaffection with the ConDems than any major shift to Labour. And there lies the problem the party needs to address. As one tweet from the Netroots event at the weekend said, "Most people buy into Tory cuts argument. Don't think they are 'fair' but....."

The economic and social arguments against cuts that candidates in the Labour leadership hustings articulated loudly and well (especially Ed Miliband, Balls and Burnham) seem to be strangely muted these days. At best, national Labour responses seem to react to the Tory agenda instead of getting across the progressive alternatives. At worst there is no real consensus or commitment to those alternatives. Repeating the mixed and fudged messages of the election campaign that effectively implied the Tories might be almost right (but not quite) on the economy is not the route to re-election.

In the long silence after the gerenal election, the only real challenge to the Tory agenda was coming from the broader trade union and labour movement. At the very beginning UNISONActive's 'mythbuster' series of articles challenged the 'givens' that there had to be cuts. Like many on the left, it recognised that the Tories were winning the propaganda war and there was a need to get the alternative arguments out there.

The movement swung into action to build the resources to take the arguments out, face to face, to our activisits and members. A long overdue drive to build political education and debate at grass roots level.

UNISON's East Midlands blog produced a simple to understand presentation last August laying out the myths and alternatives, later picked up by UNISON Scotland, building on detailed arguments from UNISON staff and activists and resources like LeftFootForward, the False Economy site, and the STUC's There is a Better Way campaign.

And we still need those resources because the trade union movement is still the only real voice consistently promoting a radical alternative despite the vitriolic (and cosily simplistic) campaign from the forces of the right - and sadly - from the dumbed-down 'political' mass media.

Take Len McCluskey's valiant attempt to get the real issues across on Radio Four this morning in the face of an interrupting interviewer intent on hearing more from himself than the interviewee. Large parts of the media really have swallowed (or indeed invented) the myth that there is no alternative and treat anyone who dare argue the opposite with an almost dismissive incredulity. How often have we heard so-called dispassionate interviewers starting off debates with, "We know there has to be cuts...".

Officials and activists across the country will testify to encountering that approach in every media contact.

Thankfully, Len did get his message across that the cuts were "an attack on the very social architecture that has held our nation together for 60-odd years" and at least the BBC Radio 4 website was gracious enough to report that. But how much further will that message get?

So if Labour are not so far winning the argument on the economy, the responsibility lies even more heavily on the trade union movement to make those arguments. On the Today programme, fine. On radio and TV, fine. On blogs, websites and social networking media, absolutely. But really we need activists, equipped with the information, making the arguments among personal networks, in the workplace face to face and at the Branch AGMs that will be coming up across the country in the weeks to come.

Oh, and not to forget taking those arguments into the Labour Party itself. This could just be a failure to get the message across effectively but you can't help feeling that if the shadow cabinet were all as convinced by the arguments as we are, they might have been putting up a more robust show.

Health workers reject divisive two year freeze

2011-01-11T20:13:00.000Z

Members of UNISON’s Health Service Group Executive have today rejected a two-year freeze on pay increments, on top of the pay freeze imposed by the Government.

NHS Employers had offered a no compulsory redundancy agreement in return for the freeze. Members rejected the deal because there was no guarantee that all employers would abide by it. It would not be binding, but left to individual Trusts to decide whether or not to offer the guarantee.

Mike Jackson, UNISON Senior National Officer for Health, said:

“The Service Group Executive said today that they could not support a further pay freeze for nurses, paramedics and other low paid, mainly women workers.

“The funding gap in the NHS is so great that members were sceptical that Trusts would abide by a no compulsory redundancy agreement for two years.

“Additionally they felt that the offer was divisive because it excluded high level clinicians, such as matrons, senior occupational therapists and midwife supervisors.”

Public Documents Provide a Look inside Sodexo's Troubled Contract to Feed U.S. Marines

2011-01-09T18:33:00.000Z

By Josh Glasstetter

Federal contractors have a responsibility to provide quality services at fair prices. As part of SEIU's ongoing efforts to ensure that federal contractors respect both their employees and American taxypayers, we are providing a detailed look inside Sodexo's $1.2 billion food service contract with the Marine Corps.

In 2002, the Marines Corps consolidated all food service operations in the United States into two contracts - the Regional Garrison Food Service Contracts, East Coast and West Coast. The Marine Corps awarded both contracts, the largest for domestic military food service, to global outsourcing giant Sodexo.

Federal and state public records, obtained by Freedom of Information Act requests, document cost overruns, food safety problems and audit issues. Taken together, they raise serious questions about Sodexo's handling of this major federal contract.

Cost Savings Become Cost Overruns on Sodexo's Contracts with the Marine Corps
Instead of achieving the promised $20 million per year cost savings, contract costs far exceeded budget targets, ballooning from $881 million to $1.2 billion over the eight-year life. For example, the contracts failed to include a way for the government to fully capture savings when the number of meals served decreased because Marines had gone to war.

Whether or not contracting bureaucrats want to admit these are cost overruns, the actual contract costs exceeded the expected cost on these fixed-price contracts by 36%, which is more than the average cost overruns on cost-plus contracts for major weapons systems.

Food Safety Issues on Sodexo's Contracts with the Marine Corps
Sodexo's approach pivoted on a centralized food processing plant, known as a "cook-chill" facility, which proved to be problematic. A RAND Corporation report to the Secretary of Defense states, "The Marine Corps food service program, for example, discovered the potential of centralized provision of services through cook/chill technology by talking to providers using this technology; Sodexho (sic) was one of these. This helped the Marine Corps imagine a completely new, regional approach to food service." Despite the central role the technology was intended to play in achieving cost savings and quality enhancements, Sodexo abandoned this facility well before its contract with the Marine Corps ended. Before Sodexo stopped shipping food for Marines from the Cook-Chill, USDA recalled nearly 3,000 pounds of chicken for possible contamination with the potentially deadly Listeria bacteria, some of which was received by Marine Corps bases.

Highly Redacted Audit Reports Leave Many Questions Unanswered
The Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) provides audits and financial advice regarding Defense Department contracts to ensure taxpayer dollars are spent on fair and reasonable contract prices. DCAA generated over 80 audit reports for Sodexo's contracts, but the Marine Corps redacted virtually all useful information--including very basic information such as how much they paid to Sodexo each quarter to perform the contract. If DCAA actually serves "the public interest as its primary customer," then taxpayers deserve answers and accountability for contractors including full disclosure of DCAA audits.

Moving Forward, Protecting Taxpayers and Marines
Serving high quality, safe and nutritious meals should not be rocket science and should not have rocketing cost overruns, food safety problems, or questions about billing and accounting practices.
An investigation into cost escalation and other issues is the responsible action to take, so that lessons may be learned and applied to the next contract before it is awarded. Such a review would make a fitting laboratory for improving Department of Defense acquisition practices. Not only will the review provide additional lessons which can assist in refining the Marine Corps' contracts' requirements, it may also provide guidance for future food service contracts, such as the Air Force Food Transformation Initiative.

2011: The year political activism and progressive politics goes open source

2011-01-08T16:12:00.000Z

By Aaron Peters, Left Foot Forward

The last several months have witnessed some of the most exciting developments in British grassroots politics for a generation. While in the immediate aftermath of the May general election it appeared, all be it briefly, that a coalition government of the Liberal Democrat and Conservative parties might be able to articulate a coherently centrist ‘Liberal Communitarian’ agenda that might potentially win broad public support for the medium term, the last few months indicate otherwise.

Discontent has mobilised across several groups, including schoolkids, university students, trade unions and, most importantly, passionately concerned members of the British general public from a diversity of backgrounds. The first organised and innovative manifestations of this discontent have been facilitated by networks not organisations.

It has been the student movement, multi-headed in nature (including the occupations movement, the National Campaign against Fees and Cuts, the London Student Assembly and the Education Activist Network) that has mobilised and won political arguments against reforms to higher education and the abolition of the Education Maintenance Allowance - not the NUS.

Likewise it is the UKuncut movement and other networked platforms such as False Economy that are making the arguments in both the old and new media and engaging with actions on the ground whom are making the early running against the cuts more generally and corporate tax evasion in particular rather than the unions, although the latter are beginning to now mobilise and will be a massive and vital voice in the months and years ahead.

It is these networks, such as the student occupation movement and UKuncut that utilise zero-cost social media tools and networks to organise and communicate, that are one of the big political stories of 2010. Along with Wikileaks and Anonymous it is these actors that give credibility to the argument that in 2010 we finally saw the internet and the immense possibilities it brings in terms of undermining all the certainties of the ‘Old Politics’.

The vast tranche of Wikileaks documents gives credence to the belief of many cyber-activists since Richard Stallman that with these tools and systems, ‘information wants to be free’, and that in the words of John Gilmore, ‘the net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it’. Just as state censorship in the age of the internet is massively undermined so to the possibilities for social movements engaging in contention at the grassroots level are exponentially increased.

One important aspect of this new politics is what one might refer to as its ‘open source’ nature, just as the Linux operating system and Wikipedia can be built upon by anyone with the capabilities, skills and requisite passion to do so, these movements are constituted in a similar fashion crowdsourcing the skillsets and social networks of anybody who wishes to participate.

Hitherto NGOs and social movement ‘organisations’ have been exactly that, organisations, with centralised bureaucracies and internal hierarchies – a coterie of activists who ‘produce’ activism and a mass membership who consume it. This paradigm can be extended from the trade unions, to the NUS, and might be seen as an equivalent to the ‘closed source’ approach of Microsoft and the Encyclopedia Britannica where only a small cadre of professionals contribute to the code or add to the content of the encyclopedia.

In the new ’crowdsourced’ paradigm the distinction between producers and consumers of dissent is dissolved – there is no organising or membership structure in place, with instead all individuals being potential ‘participants’ within a movement.

Anyone can contribute, hence we have the rise of what has been termed dissent entrepreneurs with such individuals similtaneously performing the old roles of both producers and consumers of dissent – indeed they are much like those who participate in citizen journalism or use content on Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo or Twitter being what Alvin Toffler called ‘Prosumers’ - at once producing dissent, mobilising and faciliating it - while also participating in actions facilitated by others.

An example of this new paradigm might be a student involved in a university occupation, who would participate in a demo organised by the National Campaign against Fees and Cuts, who would later blog and share via Facebook and Twitter content they have watched on the False Economy website as well as their own photos of the demo in which they have participated, before the next day facilitating and organising a flashmob within the UKuncut network.

It is this prosumption of dissent and ‘entrepreneurialism’ that is vital going forward. While the trade unions will prove massively important organisations, individual trade unionists must also see themselves as capable of participating within this multiplicity of networks in combatting the cuts. This movement needs the unions, but it also needs unionists at the individual, grassroots level engaging with networks like False Economy and being dissent entrepreneurs, perhaps even more so.
This new model that is de-centered and networked and possesses the ability to spread virally may well be the big story of 2011 – a year of immense excitement for grassroots politics in our country.

It may well be the genesis of a period where political contention and dissent in general and the anti-cuts movement in particular will broaden to the point where absolutely everyone from kids to students, to parents and trade unionists, will be able to contribute, when opposition to this government, the cuts and systemic tax evasion is no longer confined to Westminster, political parties, the media and political classes, trade union leaders, lobby groups or NGOS but is available to everyone.

A year where the production of this dissent goes truly open source.

Resistance Really is Fertile

2011-01-06T21:00:00.000Z

Happy new year everyone. I hope that you all had a wonderful Christmas and new year break and managed to spend a relaxing and enjoyable time with your loved ones.

For many people the Christmas and new year period was just another where they had to go into work. I talk, of course, about the hundreds of thousands of public sector workers who we just kind of expect to be there when we need them. If roads need gritting, or bins need emptying, or we fall ill then we just expect it to happen when we need it.

Nowhere is this more so than with the NHS. We only really think about the NHS on what is thankfully, for most people, the relatively few times when we fall ill in our lives. For the NHS though there are no closing days and for many in this crown jewel of public services very poor conditions of work.

I recently joined a picket line at a hospital where very low paid workers, doing some of the most physically taxing and sometimes dirtiest jobs in the hospital, were being denied sick pay should they fall ill and, in some cases, ironically, needing the services of the very hospital they worked for. In a speech to the inspiring strikers at a rally I likened the behaviour of the contractor for which they worked at this hospital to something from the 19th Century.

This all came to mind again when I was watching an adaptation of the classic Dickens novel A Christmas Carol. It was of course the obvious comparison with Scrooge that reminded me of the situation that I came across at the hospital. Treating workers with little or no respect and degrading their dignity seems to be something that is not a thing of the past. However, neither is workers fighting back. Time after time when employers decide to reduce workers to mere commodities, to be used, abused and then disposed of at will, people stand up and resist. Thats what is happening across the country right now. Resistance is fertile.

(This article first appeared in the Birmingham Mail on 5 January 2011)

Community coalition

2011-01-05T22:50:00.000Z

Clare Williams explains the thinking behind an innovative, union-led alliance

Public sector jobs are vital to the north-east England economy, comprising a third of all employment in the region. The coalition’s cuts will have a devastating impact here, potentially taking unemployment to unprecedented post-war levels and bringing back social deprivation not seen since Margaret Thatcher’s government.

Trade unions are fighting back with a regional campaign. The concept of a ‘public services alliance’ involving trade unions, local voluntary/community sector organisations, user groups and politicians was conceived months before the election, when it became clear that massive public sector cuts were on the mainstream political agenda. Working closely with the PCS union, Unison Northern laid the foundations and the Northern Public Services Alliance (NPSA) was launched in June.

We are in for a long struggle: taking on the coalition government, fighting local employers, winning support for an alternative economic agenda and building a political alternative.

New ways of organising are required, engaging beyond our usual ranks, and bringing in new union members and activists to reflect the diversity of our workplaces and communities. Particular emphasis is on attracting women, who account for 65 per cent of public sector jobs, and young people, who are struggling to gain employment or access to further training.

The NPSA strategy has four strands. Alongside developing and promoting an alternative economic agenda, emphasis will be placed on workplace organising and engaging membership within the local coalitions. This is crucial to its sustainability. We need to instil in our members the belief that we can win. If we win, it will be because of the strength of the unions.

In the workplace, the emphasis is on promoting an alternative economic agenda and developing a positive negotiating agenda. These include issues of learning and development and work-life balance alongside the key demands of no privatisation, no compulsory redundancies and trade union/workforce engagement. We have produced a campaign pack to help activists and give them confidence in explaining this plan to the lay membership.

Once members’ support for the strategy has been won, the strategy is to then campaign for employers to agree a protocol, as at Newcastle City Council. Employers who do not co-operate will face mobilisations and potential strike action.

Face-to-face communication with members and accountable leadership of trade union branches are key to this process. Also imperative to the success of the campaign is building meaningful community-trade union alliances. Community and voluntary engagement in the defence of public services is essential. This means making the agenda relevant for these sectors – making it clear that this is not just about defending jobs, but rather about developing a clear response to the Tories’ ‘big society’ and a strategy for community engagement in service delivery and design.

An understanding of the implications of the cuts is necessary, together with the development of alternative proposals that allow service users and communities access to policy decisions at local level. This is our opportunity to reclaim democracy and provide practical alternatives.

Local coalitions have already been established across the region and have regular monthly meetings. It is significant that women are taking leading positions, making up the majority of local co-ordinators/chairs. Unison Northern has appointed a community organiser for 12 months specifically to build and support a community coalition in Newcastle. Next spring we are also planning a major ‘social forum’ style open event on the future of public services and communities and how we can organise the resistance together between trade unions, community, voluntary and political activists.

The last important strand is our political strategy. The political make-up of the region’s councils and MPs is such that the north east should be leading the fight to save public services. The political aspect of the strategy is to persuade Labour groups, MPs, trade unions, and local councillors to sign up to a common agenda, creating a political bloc in the region, with a common strategy and position on key policy issues.

We have already begun to approach Labour MPs and council leaders, and are working on a manifesto, building on Unison’s Million Voices campaign, for May’s local elections, which we will be asking politicians to sign up to.

Already the Public Services Alliance model is being adopted elsewhere, and Unison and PCS have signed a joint statement on working together. The challenge we face is huge. However, early signs are positive, with NPSA coalitions growing in numbers and our message reaching into communities. This government does not have a mandate for its slash and burn approach to public services, and we believe that Cameron and Osborne are in for a shock in the months ahead.

Clare Williams is the convenor of Unison’s northern region

Cameron has tried to cover for his Chancellor on VAT and ended up sounding foolish - Johnson

2011-01-05T22:23:00.002Z

Alan Johnson MP, Labour's Shadow Chancellor, said in response to David Cameron's attempt today to defend the VAT rise:

"David Cameron has tried to cover for his Chancellor and ended up sounding foolish.

"VAT is clearly a regressive tax.

"The Prime Minister should come clean, stop playing games and admit VAT will hit the poor hardest."

Violence that is too close to home

2011-01-04T19:57:00.000Z

By Rebecca King Morrow, RN, SEIU Local 1021

In an ongoing effort to stop workplace violence, SEIU nurses and other healthcare workers are blogging about their experiences and concerns related to violence on the job. This first such blog is by Rebecca King Morrow, RN, SEIU Local 1021.

On October 23, 2010 there was tragic news in the San Francisco bay area. A psychiatric technician, Donna Gross, was killed on the job at Napa State Hospital. A mentally ill patient at the facility allegedly strangled her. Napa is a state hospital for the mentally ill that has 2,400 employees for 1,160 patients, of which 995 are forensic patients referred by the courts. Her death was a sad reminder of the unspoken danger health care providers face.
Then just days later, on October 25, 2010, a registered nurse was attacked at the Contra Costa County Jail at Martinez. Cynthia Palomata, RN was struck in the head with a lamp by a violent inmate who was out of control. On the 28th life support was withdrawn and Cynthia died from the assault.

There was more to the tragedy and it hit way too close to home for many SEIU 1021 RNs. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Cynthia had worked at San Francisco General Hospital for 15 years. The newspaper went on to say that Cynthia left SFGH after she injured her back while lifting a patient. The Chronicle stated the inmate, "grabbed a lamp - brought into the jail by nurses to help them read paperwork - and hit her in the head, knocking her unconscious."

How many ways and how many systems failed this nurse? First, I thought of her back injury which, with proper equipment and staffing, should have been preventable.

Then I thought about how the security systems in the jail failed her. I think what bothered me the most was, why do nurses have to provide their own lamp in order to do their job? The tool became a lethal weapon and perhaps the jail should have been responsible for providing adequate safe light. Too often, we are using gum and scotch tape to piece together worksites because we have given up on administrative/facilities support.

I also worry that in an attempt to cover their systems failure that Cynthia or some other nurse at the jail is going to be blamed for this tragedy. Somehow the culture of medicine is known for blaming the targets of violence.

Since these tragedies, there have been outcries and a state legislator has stepped forward to introduce legislation. I keep thinking state legislation could be helpful but national legislation could help nurses all over the country.

These are just two tragedies among thousands in a country which has failed to address violence as a health care issue. The evidence shows that workers in the health care sector are at greater risk of violence than workers in any other sector. We have to change, not only the laws, but also the health care culture that accepts violence as just part of the job.

UNISON Connexions members take industrial action – Thursday 6th January

2011-01-04T19:46:00.001Z

Around 180 UNISON members in Birmingham Connexions will stage a half day Industrial Action from 1pm on Thursday 6^th January to fight the planned 24% job cuts- the first industrial action in the biggest local authority in the country directly against spending cuts in public services.

UNISON members make up around 70% of the Connexions Birmingham workforce so union leaders are expecting a significant impact. Managers have yet to announce whether Connexions Advice Centres in Broad Street, Kings Heath and Northfield will close.

UNISON members will protest outside these Connexions Centres from 12.30pm on Thursday and then move onto a Rally in the BMI, 9 Margaret Street, B3 3BS at 3pm. Shabana Mahmood MP for Ladywood and Roger McKenzie UNISON West Midlands Regional Secretary will speak at the Rally of members and supporters.

Roger McKenzie, UNISON West Midlands Regional Secretary commented:

“I am deeply disappointed that the Council have, so far, refused to listen to the concerns voiced by UNISON Connexions members and young people who have spoken out in support of Connexions over the last few months.

We all now know that the Conservative-led Government is unfairly undermining young people. From cuts to Connexions, to EMA, to tuition fees, to job programmes for the young, to school sport partnerships it is young people who are taking the full force of the Government’s dangerous cuts.

At a time like this, our young people need all the support they can get. I call on Birmingham City Council to not follow the ideological dogma of the Government and listen to their own employees and the public and ensure that our fabulous Connexion workers do not face compulsory redundancy.

UNISON Connexions Convenor John Griffin says:

“We are taking this action as a last resort. Managers have closed consultations on avoiding job losses despite the need for Connexions to provide Careers Advisers for the new All Age Careers Service. The City council has some alternatives that could avoid compulsory redundancies.

This with the EMA cuts is part of a massive attack on young people who need the most help to stay in education or training.”

Notes to editors

- Connexions services provide careers advice information, guidance and ongoing support for young people 13-19.

- Connexions services in Stafford and Coventry have already experienced closure or massive cuts.

- Connexions in Birmingham is facing a 24% budget cut for 2011/12 which could mean 30 compulsory redundancies (12% of the workforce) including front line advisers.

The cat-flap coalition

2011-01-03T17:02:00.000Z

by Dan McCurry

Forged in the white heat of opportunism, the cat-flap coalition has ended the year with more resilience than we ever expected. Back in the summer, we talked about how long it would last. We underestimated the lure. We thought that Cameron had put out a saucer of milk, but it turned out to be goose liver pâté. And we seem to have lost our cat.

Hollywood screenwriters say that the first act ends when the protagonist passes the point-of-no-return. In this film, that happened when Dave held back the pâté as the reward for Nick committing to £9,000 tuition fees. Nick licked his lips and agreed. Now he is stuck in this movie, and, for him, there is no return.

Well before the election, Cameron told us that he planned to screw the students. But we did not listen. Each time that he accused the Labour party of creating a generation of debt, it seemed like just a rhetorical attack on Labour. Now we know that he meant that the young would pay for the deficit. It was not rhetoric. It was policy.

When we see the Tories bat away the students’ anger, towards the sandal wearers, we do not just see the stupidity of Clegg, but also the trickiness of Cameron. This is what we are up against. Tricky Dave is not to be underestimated.

It is often said that Cameron is hated by his own party. However, they cannot help but admire him. After all, there is nothing a Tory admires more than a bastard. And he has certainly proved his mettle as that. He represents the Darwinian philosophy that they wish to impose on us all: the rights of the individual over the community, the strong destroying the weak, the winner taking all.

The word “coalition” makes this bastardised amalgamation of right-wing ideology and cat-flap Liberals sound nice. Reasonable even. Well done Greg Beales, Ed Miliband’s chief wonk, who told the shadow cabinet to stop using the word. It makes them too cuddly, he reckons.

But his alternative is to call them the “Conservative-led government”. But this does not capture the true character of this bread-roll thrower and his sandal-wearing apprentice, this “cat-flap coalition”.
It is surprising how hard a time the Tories get when they go on Question Time and blame the deficit on the previous government. Whether you like it or not, it was us who created the deficit. But when the Tories point this out, they get booed. Because people just do not like them. They are not sure why. But they do not.

With us it is different. They did not vote us out because they did not like us. They generally do like us. They voted us out because they saw that we were tired. In last year’s election, plenty of people said they would like Labour back after the Tories had sorted out the deficit. They wanted the Tories to come in, do the job, and then leave.

This is the problem of “nice-guy Dave”. Once people got to know him, they saw him for what he is. If he had presented himself as a good old fashioned “I just want to cut your taxes” Tory, then people would have had a grudging respect for him. As it is, he has always tried to be something that he is not: “nice-guy Dave”.

Let us bring down his paper thin, but deeply cherished, image. Let us call him “tricky Dave” every time we can. Let us help people to better understand what exactly it is that they do not like about him. Let us call him “tricky Dave”, again and again, until it sticks.

And let us call his alliance with “honest” Nick Clegg by its proper name too: the cat-flap coalition.

(From the Labour Uncut blog)

The Human Rights Act: another false attack

2011-01-03T16:51:00.000Z

By Brian Barder / @brianlb

Tories from the Prime Minister downwards, and (to their shame) some relics of New Labour, lose no opportunity to lambast the Human Rights Act, which the Conservatives (but not the coalition) still threaten to repeal and replace. The latest attack on the HRA has been prompted by outrage over the widely reported failure of a campaign to deport an Iraqi convicted of running down and killing a little girl in Blackburn. The driver, Aso Mohammed Ibrahim, left the child under the wheels of his car and ran away. The child’s father has been campaigning for years to have him deported. The Daily Mail and the Prime Minister have been among those blaming the decision not to deport the guilty driver on the Human Rights Act. Both are wrong.

The facts of the case were lucidly set out in an article by the distinguished human rights lawyer, Sir Geoffrey Bindman, in an article for Our Kingdom on openDemocracy on December 29th. There’s no need for me to set it out again here. The article begins:

"It is time not only to defend the Human Rights Act but [also] to counter-attack the falsehoods and distortions of those who misrepresent it. Regrettably these include the Prime Minister as well as more predictable elements of the media, particularly the Daily Mail. Furthermore, it is time for Labour to speak up for the Act which it courageously introduced in the face of bureaucratic opposition to enable people to defend their fundamental rights from arbitrary power – including, of course, the despotic power of the press."

If anyone has earned the right to speak out for the Human Rights Act, it’s Sir Geoffrey Bindman.
The Human Rights Act is one of the achievements of Tony Blair’s Labour government of which all Labour people can and should be proud. The fact that government ministers of all political persuasions sometimes feel frustrated by the constraints it imposes on an anyway over-mighty executive is compelling evidence that the rule of law may conflict with the wishes of the executive and that when this happens, the rule of law must be paramount — a fundamental principle that was tragically breached in the decision to go to war with Iraq. In this specific case, however, the fact that Aso Mohammed Ibrahim was not deported after serving his prison sentence had nothing at all to do with the Human Rights Act, as Geoffrey Bindman shows. We expect the unscrupulous reactionaries of the Daily Mail to ignore the truth in their search for ammunition in their populist campaigns, but we’re surely entitled to something a little better from Mr Cameron.

The Prime Minister has also been guilty of seriously misrepresenting, by clear implication, the stated policy of the government which he heads in regard to the future of the HRA. As Bindman says:

"The Prime Minister’s suggestion that he will repeal the HRA to prevent anything like this happening again flatly contradicts the coalition agreement and would leave us still bound by the European Convention. He has already been told this by his lawyers."

The scandalous aspersions later cast while still in office on their own Act by some New Labour Ministers, including Tony Blair, are another example of the millstones left round the Labour Party’s neck by too many of the illiberal utterances and unprincipled measures that they left behind. Ed Miliband has shown from the beginning of his leadership that he recognises the imperative need for Labour to take advantage of its time in opposition to liberate itself from the murkier elements of the New Labour record, especially over Iraq and civil rights. A reaffirmation of the importance of the Human Rights Act, and of Labour’s determined opposition to any attempt to repeal or replace it, will be a big step in the right direction.

Postscript: Labour should never be taken in by the flawed Tory mantra that “with rights go responsibilities” — used to explain the intention to repeal the HRA by a new law designed, we’re told, to spell out the responsibilities of the citizen as well as her rights. The implication of this can only be that the exercise of our rights are conditional on the fulfilment of our responsibilities, a completely unacceptable proposition. Stalin, Mao and Hitler all sought to justify trampling on the fundamental rights of their peoples by asserting that failure to fulfil civic responsibilities, as defined by the state (i.e. themselves), entailed the loss of those rights. The American Founding Fathers got it right, as usual:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…”

Please remind your MP of this if she (or he) tries to tell you that the thousands of our fellow citizens currently filling our prisons to bursting-point should not be allowed to vote in UK elections because by breaking the law, they have lost their rights. No, they have not. They have temporarily lost the right to liberty, as recognised and authorised by the Human Rights Act and its parent, the European Human Rights Convention. Their other rights remain intact; at any rate, they should.

Labour’s woman of the year and the struggle to remake foreign policy

2011-01-03T10:55:00.000Z

By Larry Smith
Ask Labour members which of its politicians enjoyed the best 2010, and many would probably answer Yvette Cooper. The 41-year old mother of three began the year widely regarded for her work at the Department for Work and Pensions, was briefly considered an outside bet for the leadership of the party before sweeping all before her in the shadow cabinet elections to take up the post of Shadow Foreign Secretary in October. Along the way she won plaudits for taking the new government to task over welfare, and was praised for leading the fight against the Coalition’s attempt to quietly roll back advances on equality.

But for all her progress, Cooper now faces a daunting test: a brief in which she has little previous experience, as well as the challenge of remaking Labour’s international policy at a time when multiple crises are stretching the global community. And on the evidence so far, she still has much left to accomplish.

In assessing Labour’s approach to foreign policy under Cooper to date, the first and most obvious problem is the party’s lack of engagement with the war in Afghanistan. In her first major speech on international affairs at the Chatham House think tank on December 13th, Labour’s approach to the conflict was referenced only fleetingly, with Cooper merely stating that the party ‘welcomed the continued mission in Afghanistan’ and would support increased aid to the country. She has offered no comment on the catastrophic decision to rush headlong into negotiations with a bogus Taliban commander and while her response to the murder of aid worker Linda Norgrove in the House of Commons was well-judged, Cooper has not used her appearances in parliament to raise major qualms with the government’s long-term strategy. The shadow foreign secretary has not followed her predecessor’s example of using Foreign Office questions to challenge William Hague about the development of the war and has submitted just three written questions on the subject, covering police recruitment, electoral fraud in Helmand and the High Peace Council respectively. It’s possible this lack of activity is a deliberate ploy while Cooper attempts to reconcile differences within Labour about Britain’s involvement in the region, but such disagreements should not preclude her from showing the party still understands the intricacies of the problem.

The shadow foreign secretary has also said little about the precarious situation in Pakistan, something that has huge implications for the fight against terrorism and the stability of the Asian subcontinent. Cooper’s only real intervention on Pakistan so far came when she replied to a statement by Hague on Afghanistan on the 27th October, during which she asked the Foreign Secretary if he had met with President Zardari’s administration to discuss security in the region. Junior spokesman John Spellar made brief intervention on Pakistan in an unrelated debate in Westminster Hall on the 20th October, but Labour’s foreign affairs team hasn’t focussed on the way in which political divisions in Pakistan are helping to fuel continued chaos in the area and unlike her predecessor, Cooper has yet to highlight the need to improve the country’s moribund institutions and the limited authority it holds along the northwest frontier. She has additionally neglected to follow David Miliband in pointing to Kashmir as a motor for radical Islam in the region and has not sustained his criticism of David Cameron for pandering to New Delhi over Pakistan’s involvement in terror plots when he visited India last summer.

Iran’s attempt to acquire weapons of mass destruction is another issue that has fallen by the wayside since Cooper assumed the foreign affairs portfolio in October. In her Chatham House speech, the shadow foreign secretary did not mention Tehran’s nuclear ambitions once, let alone hint at where a future Labour government might stand on inspections, the effectiveness of existing international sanctions or the rights or wrongs of military action against the Islamic Republic. Cooper’s press statements on Iran have been limited to the condemnation of unpleasant – but unrelated - human rights abuses in the country, and her office gave no response to inconclusive talks held by the E3+3 (of which Britain is a member) and Tehran in December. It would be naïve to expect even the most formidable of politicians to master nuclear diplomacy so soon but given Britain’s role in negotiations and a split between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats over how to deal with Iran, this is something that Labour cannot avoid thinking through.

Away from the traditional hotspots, Cooper has also been evasive about some of the fundamental concepts that lie at the heart of foreign policy. Her office has routinely condemned threats to freedom around the world, with releases criticising the behaviour of the military junta in Burma, the mistreatment of women and political prisoners in Iran and the actions of Israeli settlers in the West Bank. But she has not articulated whether she believes humanitarian issues should determine the UK’s foreign policy above all other factors, as Tony Blair argued in his 1999 Chicago Speech. It may be unfair to expect someone who has spent their entire career thinking about economics to develop foreign policy doctrines overnight, but Cooper’s lack of grounding in its complex disputes is a problem and can be already seen in her attitude to certain countries, most notably China. At once the shadow foreign secretary emphasises the importance of economic ties and places a high priority on trade with the People’s Republic as a means to boosting Britain’s sagging exports while castigating it for mistreating Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo. Aside from the fact that some members of the politburo don’t need an education in the painful cost of political oppression, this is a slightly contradictory approach, one that doesn’t really provide the Labour Party with a clear framework in dealing with general foreign policy problems as they arise in the future.

Cooper’s short tenure has been far from a disaster, and the success with which she tackled previous briefs suggests she’ll come to master her new portfolio in time. But as Labour’s brightest talent seeks to cap an extraordinary year, she must not be afraid to think deeply about global challenges and speak with confidence about them. The world is waiting.

NUPGE makes a stand over membership raiding‏

2011-01-03T10:50:00.000Z

UNISON sister union NUPGE is in conflict with the Canadian Labor Congress (CLC) over the latter's failure to deal effectively with the practice of raiding (poaching) of one union's members by another.

NUPGE President James Clancy says in his commentary on the conflict: "raiding is destructive to solidarity, doesn’t advance the interests of workers and wastes precious resources that should be used to service members and organize non-union workers.

Unfortunately, some CLC affiliated unions continue to raid other CLC affiliates. NUPGE has never subscribed to the position that some other CLC affiliates have taken: “if you are raided, then you should just raid back”:
http://www.nupge.ca/content/3829/presidents-commentary-nupge-clc-dispute-over-raiding

Public sector job cut notices to arrive 'like confetti' after New Year

2011-01-03T10:39:00.000Z

Matthew Taylor
guardian.co.uk, Friday 31 December 2010 20.45 GMT
Article history

A man cleans the streets in front of the Bank of England, in London. The GMB union warned that job cuts could lead to 'the wholesale decimation of frontline services'. Photograph: Lorna Roach

Hundreds of thousands of public sector employees will return to work next week under a cloud of "fear and trepidation" as local authorities prepare to reveal the full extent of jobs and local services cuts, union leaders have warned .Brian Strutton, general secretary of the GMB, said the number of posts under threat following the swingeing cuts to councils' budgets earlier this year had now already topped 90,000 with more than half of local authorities still to reveal their plans."It is the wholesale decimation of frontline services," Strutton said. "Every single one of these job losses has a human story behind it and people are asking 'Why me? What have I done wrong? Who is going to provide the services now?'"Tens of thousands of "at risk" notices have already hit doormats across the country, warning council staff their jobs are under threat. But union officials say they are expecting a fresh wave to arrive "like confetti" over the next two weeks as some of the country's biggest authorities – including several London boroughs – outline their plans."We are expecting large-scale redundancies as Kent and Surrey and the rest of the London boroughs will have to declare how many jobs they will lose," said Strutton. "The Local Government Association has predicted that 140,000 posts will be lost in local government in 2011/12 and that seems very realistic to us. It is going to be a very bleak 2011 for local council workers."The imminent bloodletting in town halls is seen as the first tangible sign of the government's austerity budget beginning to bite outside Whitehall. According to the GMB, 111 councils have already issued forms that set out upper estimates of the numbers of staff they expect to have to make redundant, informing 90,000 employees that their jobs are now at risk.The remaining authorities are expected to follow suit in the next two weeks.The coalition has argued that private sector job creation will offset job losses in the public sector and before Christmas local government minister Grant Shapps accused trade unions of "ramping up" stories about job cuts in local authorities for political gain."Changes to terms and conditions, and the restructuring of job posts, are not the same as issuing P45s," said Shapps. "Every employer, whether in the private or public sector, needs to approach restructuring with care, and recognise the need to show and treat staff with respect. But the trade unions aren't helping this process by intentionally ramping up stories of job cuts for political gain."But Strutton rejected Shapps's remarks, saying the union's figures were based on the councils' own letters, and adding that they did not include tens of thousands of temporary workers, agency staff and contractors who were also likely to lose their jobs as a result of council budgets cuts.Strutton said: "When government ministers accuse us of scaremongering over these numbers it really is absolutely infuriating, because these are the notices officially being issued by councils. There are indirect job losses occurring as well that make these numbers very real."Council chiefs must reduce posts by 31 March in order to start making savings in their new reduced budgets. By law they have to give staff 90 days' notice period to staff, meaning a nominal New Year's Day notification. However, the announcement of the local government settlement was delayed earlier this month and many councils who have yet to issue "at risk" letters are now expected to buy out employees notice period in order to meet the March deadline.

Social Media Organising Tools

2011-01-03T10:32:00.000Z

By Irma Arkus on Unionbook on 20 December 2010

TOOLS & METHODS

Thus far we've discussed whether and how social media impacts labour activism, but one of the aspects I've underrepresented is the possibility for fundraising.
I know we all get beaten over the head with potential fundraising, or better yet, donation opportunities. Furthermore, as far as my personal beliefs go, I am more than mildly repulsed by the very concept of charity.
But social media, a by-product of commercial, consumer-oriented activities, undeniably seems to lend itself to the business of fundraising.
Most recently, in province of British Columbia where I incidentally hail from, environmental activists raised over $120,000 to save Mary Lake in as little as 6 weeks and intends to do a lot more.
Their tool? A handy website in the guise of www.SaveMaryLake.com, combined with the social media trinity (web, Twitter, Facebook) has received international attention and donations.
An added benefit to this type of social media-based fundraising campaign is the increased media exposure, as well as potential for international attention and access to campaign information.
Importance of having a fully supported social media campaign is something that at this point we all understand. Having a full time staff to tend to these streams of communication on practically 24/7 basis is vital.
That is not to say that social media presence is the ONLY thing required: basic principles of outreach and community organizing are also paramount to your campaign.

To make these tasks easier, I wondered what social media applications we can find to a) assist with ORGANIZING and b) fundraising. Here is the list:

One of the more popular fundraising applications you can stumble upon is ChipIn.com Entirely automated, one needs to simply create an ID in ChipIn, set target goals, and promote the code for the fundraising through available applications and websites. You can embed it practically anywhere, and send it via anything.

mGive is a mobile application, allowing for fundraising to take place via SMS messages. The application does something similar to ChipIn - you get a simple code that once texted, allows for donors to make a donation via mobile devices.

FrontlineSMS does something a little different - provides a one-to-many and many-to-one SMS messaging to take place, which makes it not only an ideal tool for fundraising, but also mass organizing.

kluster is a crowdsource organizing tool which excites me quite a bit. It allows for collective decision-making and organizing. Devised as a brainstorming or feedback application, it has endless potential for labour activism.

Facebook too is testing their crowdsourcing applications, and the mobile technologies seem to be progressively aimed at social groups.

Have you used any mobile applications for fundraising or increase awareness of a particular subject? Have you used a social-media application for organizing and what are some of the flaws and benefits to doing so?

Medirest strike in Southampton

2011-01-02T20:29:00.000Z

Wycombe Strike

2011-01-02T20:27:00.000Z

Kay Tillow: Civil Rights, Union Organizing Mark Decades of Activism

2011-01-02T20:18:00.000Z

by Berry Craig, Jan 1, 2011

Kay Tillow

Kay Tillow, a veteran union activist from Louisville, can inspire us all as we start the New Year. “Set a stout heart to a steep hillside” is an old Scottish proverb that reminds me of Tillow, who’s executive director of the Nurses Professional Organization. She and the NPO have spent 21 years battling to organize nurses who work for Louisville-based Norton Healthcare, Kentucky’s largest health care system. Says Tillow:

“The [National Labor Relations Board] has ruled in our favor time and again. But management has continued to threaten and intimidate nurses who want the union and we’ve never gotten recognition.”

Even so, Tillow refuses to give up. “This is a human rights issue to me.”
Bill Londrigan, Kentucky State AFL-CIO president, is one of Tillow’s biggest fans.

Kay has worked tirelessly on behalf of nurses who have had to fight one of the most anti-union health care corporations in the nation. She’s a warrior for workers.

Well past retirement age, Tillow has been a union organizer for going on 40 years.

I can’t imagine living if I weren’t doing something to change things that are wrong.

Born in Paducah, Ky., and reared in nearby Metropolis, Ill., she started helping right wrongs when she was a student at the University of Illinois. In 1963, Tillow took time out from classes to join the fight for equal rights for African Americans. She traveled south and signed up with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Those were interesting times. The year before, I studied in Ghana where I met W.E.B. Du Bois. I confess I didn’t know he was an American who had helped found the NAACP.

Tillow had joined the NAACP at her alma mater. “The civil rights movement was just starting, the freedom riders. It inspired a lot of us.”
The Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists terrorized, beat up and even murdered civil rights volunteers like Tillow.

Was I afraid? How could you be afraid when everybody else around you was so courageous? They were willing to sacrifice everything, including their lives.

She fell in love and married Walter Tillow, another civil rights worker. The couple ultimately became union activists.

A lot of the injustice African Americans were suffering was economic injustice. Unions have always fought economic injustice. So it made sense for us to work within the union movement.

The Tillows became organizers for the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (UE) and Local 1199 of the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees. They won some organizing drives, and lost others. “But we never quit.”
Although she’s not a nurse, Tillow joined the NPO when it was affiliated with the Machinists (IAM). The National Nurses United (NNU) is NPO’s current affiliation. She also represents the NPO on the All Unions Committee for Single Payer Health Care, for which she is still campaigning. As she puts it: “Jesus healed and he did it for free.”
Tillow helped organize an IAM local at Lourdes Hospital in Paducah, though hospital management ultimately broke the union. While the Lourdes union was short-lived, that organizing drive is special to Tillow.

Lourdes used to be old Riverside Hospital—the hospital where I was born.

Holiday solidarity with nursing home workers on strike

2011-01-02T16:47:00.000Z

6:43 PM Eastern - December 29, 2010

By Matt O'Connor

For eight months nearly 400 nursing home workers in Connecticut have stood strong for a fair contract, safe workplaces, and quality care for the residents they serve. Our Union members have picketed and rallied with their sisters and brothers in District 1199/SEIU because their struggle is fundamentally about the future of Connecticut's middle class. And as the holidays approached, CSEA leaders "adopted a strike line" to help cover family healthcare costs for these nursing, dietary, housekeeping and laundry workers.

At their October meeting, our Union's Executive Council voted to contribute $2,500.00 to the strike fund. By that time, workers from four Spectrum Healthcare facilities had been picketing for six months as their employer refused to negotiate in good faith.

A week later, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued a complaint against the company for additional unfair practices, including Spectrum's rejection of their employees' offer to return to work. With a hearing date scheduled for January, it became clear the dispute would drag on past the holidays.

These developments and the generosity of our Executive Council inspired leaders of three of our Union's councils to step up support for the nursing home workers' strike fund. Leaders of our P-4 Council, which represents over 2,500 engineering, scientific, and technical professionals working for the State, voted to contribute $1,000.00 at their monthly delegates meeting in November.

Representatives of our Council 400, which represents retired public service workers and their spouses, continued the "Good Works" effort and two weeks later approved a $2,000.00 contribution. Then earlier this month, delegates to our P-3B Council, which represents nearly 900 instructional, educational, and rehabilitation professionals in state agencies, added another $1,000.00 donation.
The total $6,500.00 contribution meant that our Union would adopt a strike line at one of the nursing homes and cover workers' COBRA insurance costs for the month of December. A lapse in healthcare coverage is the last thing these working families should have to face during what will already be a difficult holiday season.

And our members' support for the striking nursing home workers hasn't ended there. We were back out on the picket line at Spectrum's Park Place facility in Hartford for a holiday-themed rally this past Saturday, joined by Santa Claus, an angry elf, and elected officials.

Our members will continue to stand with their sisters and brothers in District 1199 until their struggle for a fair contract (pdf) that respects the vital care they provide is won. We must support their fight for the kind of economic equality all workers deserve to keep the American Dream alive in our time.

Netroots UK: The fightback begins online

2011-01-02T16:42:00.000Z

2011 will be a crucial year for the many individuals and organisations determined to protest and mobilise public support against the government's programme of public spending cuts.

The broad scope of the cuts, and their severity will have a catastrophic effect on most of the causes and issues at the heart of progressive campaigns. To help activists and organisations learn from each other and form broad-based alliances to better resist the cuts, an event - Netroots UK - is being organised in central London early next year.

On Saturday 8 January, hundreds of bloggers, tweeters and online campaigners from around the UK will be coming together face to face for a day of campaign strategy, training and networking.
Over forty speakers - including politicians, journalists, bloggers and online campaigners, from the UK and USA - have already been confirmed for Netroots UK, which runs from 9am-5.30pm at the TUC's Congress House in London's Bloomsbury.

The online activists in attendance will hear presentations from a range of speakers including Stella Creasy MP, Ari Rabin-Havt of US media monitors Media Matters, the Guardian's Polly Toynbee, Brendan Barber of the TUC, Nick Lowles of the Hope Not Hate campaign, Alex Wilks of Avaaz, and Jess McCabe of The F Word.

Scheduled workshop sessions, including ensuring that the media delivers for progressive campaigns, raising funds for campaign projects, turning online activity into offline action, spreading campaign messages virally through humour, and video-making for campaigners will take place throughout the day.

Bringing together people from the worlds of progressive politics, tax justice, international development, unions, and community organisations, the event marks an important step in the development of a more coherent and effective progressive movement online in the UK - one that mirrors the groundbreaking work of the annual Netroots Nation conference which has been so effective in the States.

Clifford Singer, campaign director of new anti-cuts website False Economy, said:
'2010 has seen great advances in online activity in the UK, with left wing blogs increasing dramatically in popularity. This has combined with high profile campaigns against government policies like cuts to science funding and increased tuition fees, successes against the far right in the May election, and high profile direct action against tax avoiders on the high street. However, much of what is going on is
still fragmented.

'To mobilise hundreds of thousands of people behind anti-cuts campaigns in 2011, we're going to need a more co-ordinated effort, learning from good practice in each other's areas, and helping the public to see the links between issues, and the case for the alternative.'

NOTES TO EDITORS:
- More information can be found at www.netrootsuk.org
- Tickets to the event, priced at £5, can be booked online.
- Partner organisations for the event include: 38 Degrees, Avaaz, Blue State Digital, Compass,
False Economy, LabourList, Left Foot Forward, Liberal Conspiracy, Netroots Nation, Robin
Hood Tax Campaign, and the Trades Union Congress.
- All TUC press releases can be found at www.tuc.org.uk
- Register for the TUC's press extranet: a service exclusive to journalists wanting to access pre-embargo releases and reports from the TUC. Visit www.tuc.org.uk/pressextranet

March for the Alternative: Jobs, Growth, Justice

2011-01-02T16:37:00.000Z

Date Sat, 26 Mar 2011
Time to from 11:00
Location Assemble Victoria Embankment, 11am to march to a rally in Hyde Park
Description
Deep spending cuts damage public services, hit the vulnerable and threaten recovery. They're dangerous, unfair and unnecessary.

But there's an alternative - one that's fair, safe and sustainable: A Robin Hood tax on the banks; Close tax loopholes; Policies for jobs and green growth

Let's march to tell the government they need to change course
Contact for more information
http://www.tuc.org.uk/alltogether

Chelsea 3 - 3 Aston Villa

2011-01-02T16:35:00.000Z

Clark wheels away after scoring his last-gasp leveller at Stamford Bridge

By Jonathan Stevenson

Ciaran Clark's injury-time goal earned Aston Villa a point after a pulsating finish to their game against Chelsea.

Chelsea went ahead when Florent Malouda was fouled and Frank Lampard struck from the spot, before Ashley Young's penalty got Villa back on level terms.
Emile Heskey headed in to make it 2-1 to Villa before Didier Drogba slammed in from an angle and then John Terry slotted in late on to make it 3-2.
But there was still time for Clark to head in Marc Albrighton's cross.
It was a quite extraordinary conclusion to the game, reminiscent of the 4-4 draw these two teams played out in the same fixture on Boxing Day in 2007.
Villa were on course for a famous victory but they were foiled by Drogba six minutes from time and the roof nearly came off Stamford Bridge when Terry side-footed home soon after.
However, Clark's goal 55 seconds into stoppage time - which owed much to some schoolboy defending from the hosts - may have irreparably damaged Chelsea's title hopes, leaving the Blues six points behind leaders Manchester United having played a game more.
The thrilling conclusion leaves the Blues with only one win in their last eight league games and languishing in fifth, but Villa will also wonder how they did not emerge victorious from a contest which enthralled throughout.

Villa boss Gerard Houllier has faced calls from some fans to quit after a woeful run that has seen them become embroiled in a relegation battle, but in naming an experienced side to try and lift the gloom that has descended on the Midlands side in recent weeks he got his team selection spot on.
Showing an industry and desire that was badly lacking in the 4-0 capitulation at Manchester City, Villa were the better side for long periods, and recalled striker Heskey was at his belligerent best as he bullied Chelsea's 19-year-old defender Jeffrey Bruma - making his first Premier League start - for much of the afternoon.
Villa continually found gaps between Chelsea's defence and midfield and Young and Downing both forced saves from Petr Cech before the hosts took a controversial lead, Lampard scoring from the spot after Malouda went down under James Collins's tackle, even though the Frenchman appeared to commit the first foul.
Villa were livid and a flurry of bookings ensued as they took umbrage at the decision, but it did not take them long to reassert their authority and twice they wasted golden chances to level as Clark nodded over unmarked from eight yards and then Dunne somehow sliced over from even closer in.
But Villa did get the break their effort deserved as Mason pointed to the spot for the second time after a clumsy Michael Essien challenge on Nigel Reo-Coker, with Young stepping up and lashing the penalty high into the net.
It was a familiar story after the break and Chelsea soon found themselves behind when Young found Downing down the right, he created a yard of space against Ashley Cole to cross and at the far post Heskey outmuscled Bruma to nod in.
As the shock at trailing wore off Chelsea improved, but they found Brad Friedel in inspired form as he reacted superbly to tip over Lampard's volley and then saved well from Malouda with his legs.
Just when it seemed like Villa would hold on and claim a famous victory, an already fine game produced an explosive ending and Drogba started the carnage with a shot through a pile of bodies at the near post after Friedel had magnificently denied Salomon Kalou.
Chelsea piled forward looking for a winner and they must have thought they had found it when Friedel once more pulled off a stunning save from Drogba's header only to see Terry gleefully slot in from the rebound.
But Villa were not finished either and they grabbed the point their wholehearted display deserved when Chelsea got their offside trap all wrong and Albrighton's cross was headed in by Clark.
There was still time for Drogba to poke a Jose Bosingwa cross wide, but in the end these relentless sides both had to settle for a point.

Live text and stats

Sunday, 2 January 2011
Barclays Premier League

Home Team	Score	Away Team	Time
Chelsea	3-3	Aston Villa	FT
(HT 1-1)
Lampard (pen) 23 Drogba 84 Terry 89		Young (pen) 41 Heskey 47 Clark 90+1

Ed Milliband's New Year Message

2011-01-02T16:22:00.000Z

2011: Year of Consequences
Ed Miliband MP, Leader of the Labour Party:

In 2011, thousands of our bravest men and women will continue to serve far from home in Afghanistan with the highest commitment and dedication. My thoughts are with them and their families at this New Year.

Here at home, 2011 will be a year of consequences for Britain. Consequences that will be felt by hardworking families across the country. Consequences of the decision taken to reduce the deficit at what I believe to be an irresponsible pace and scale.

Many people feel powerless in the face of these decisions that will affect their lives, families and communities. The political forces in Whitehall which have made these choices appear forbidding and unheeding.

It is the message I get talking to young people about the loss of their educational maintenance allowances and trebling of tuition fees, people in different areas worried about their services and those wondering where the new jobs to replace those lost are going to come from.

In 2011, many people will wonder what they can do. Some will ask whether there really is an alternative to this scale of cuts. Still more will shrug their shoulders at casually broken promises and conclude politicians are indeed all the same.

Labour's challenge and duty in 2011 is to be people's voice in tough times and show that these are changes born of political choice by those in power not necessity.

And we will take the next steps on the journey to win people's trust that we offer a better, more optimistic future for Britain.

To do that will require learning from what we did right and wrong in government, strong opposition where it is required and laying the foundations for an alternative path for Britain.

I began my leadership by admitting that in government, we had lost touch and lost trust and that we needed to change to be the party that Britain needs. I saw it on the doorstep at the 2010 General Election and I know it can't be put right automatically.
It is why our journey to construct a better future for Britain must start from people's lives and their hopes and dreams. And we must change our party so that it becomes a genuine community force in every part of the country.

People also need our voice now.

So in 2011, we will be arguing for a proper economic strategy rather than an economic policy reduced only to deficit reduction. We would have made cuts but the scale, pace and targeting of these changes is not just wrong, it holds us back from answering the bigger economic challenges we face: about where the jobs of the future are going to come from and how can we create an economy which works for all.

We will stand up for young people because the promise of progress should be that the next generation does better than the last. That is not what young people feel is being delivered when they face the burden of tens of thousands of pounds of student debt, or are told there will be no more help to stay on at school or college or to find a job.

And we will expose the promise of new politics when it is simply about the breaking of promises in 2011 that were made in 2010.

And as we begin a New Year, I call on all people of other parties and none who share our values and worry about the direction of the country under this government to work with us.

I said in my Labour Party Conference speech that I have never believed that all wisdom resides in one political party. That is why I want to reach out to all other forces of progress in Britain.

To those who feel that politics as it is being practised is high-handed, remote and arbitrary, I also urge them to campaign and work with us. Decisions over school sport and in recent days, bookstart, were reversed because of the power of people arguing and winning their case.

It shows that political change comes because people make it happen.
2011 will be a year where we work to change Labour and seek to rebuild trust in us and in politics as a force for good.

Even in these tough times, we must keep the flame of optimism burning.

I sincerely believe that we can build a better future for Britain. That means closing the gap between people's aspirations and their chances of fulfilling them, being a society where we look after each other and meeting the promise that the next generation does better than the last.

That is our mission as a party which we will pursue next year and in the years ahead.

Enough to make you sick - UNISON issues New Year Challenge

2011-01-02T16:19:00.000Z

UNISON, the UK’s largest union, is today issuing a New Year challenge to public sector employers to “do the right thing” and give sick pay to all their workers.

The union is angry and frustrated that across the country, many contracted out catering and cleaning workers in schools and hospitals are denied this basic right – at the same time as being paid on, or just above, the minimum wage*.

Dave Prentis, UNISON General Secretary, said:

“It cannot be right that these massive multinational companies can make huge profits but still cheat workers out of basic terms like sick pay – it is enough to make anyone sick. Cleaners and dinner ladies in schools and hospitals are paid on or just above the minimum wage, and struggle to make ends meet. Many also struggle into work when they are sick, risking their own health and the health of people around them. This is particularly true in hospitals where vulnerable patients may be put at risk by catching infections.

“UNISON is outraged at government plans to scrap the two-tier workforce code, which could see even more workers’ rights sacrificed for company profits this year, sparking a race to the bottom. We want local authorities, hospitals and contractors to do the right thing and make a new year resolution to pay all their staff sick pay. They must ward against this 19th century-style treatment, and make 2011 the year for fair treatment.”

Under current two-tier workforce code, new starters employed by contract companies are meant to get broadly comparable wages, terms and conditions as staff transferred across from the public sector. The code was developed to prevent private contractors making savings by driving down staff terms and conditions.

However, earlier this month, the government announced it was to scrap the two-tier code. Together with the increasing push to sell services off to the lowest bidder, UNISON fears the moves will see increasing numbers of workers suffering cuts to terms and conditions, with sick pay at the top of the hit list.

*£5.93

Companies and contracts not giving sick pay:

Compass in Reading schools, Westminster schools, Buckinghamshire Hospital.

Sodexo in more than 70 Richmond schools, at Birmingham Children's Hospital, in Papworth and Chesterfield hospitals.

Medirest in hospitals in East Kent, including Ashford, Ramsgate and Canterbury.

And also ISS workers in Walsall Hospitals.

Economic vandalism: not voted for by the people not in the interests of this country

2010-12-30T16:28:00.000Z

Working people in the UK can help stop the Conservative-led coalition from taking a wrecking ball to the fabric of daily life.

That is the New Year's message to some 3.5 million workers across both the public and private sectors from their unions, the GMB, Unison and Unite, who say that the government's dangerous prescription of economic deflation and historically high cuts will not revive the economy but will instead bring it to its knees.

The landmark joint message sees the three unions - the biggest in the UK - pledge that in 2011 they will inspire and support resistance to the cuts across the UK. They also vow to make the Spring elections the first referendum on the government's austerity programme.

Such is the level of concern about the real intent behind the cuts - recasting the state so that the private sector can sweep in, allied to the fear that harsh cuts will cause endemic inequality across society and plunge a new generation into unemployment - that the unions have vowed to work tirelessly together throughout 2011 to pursue a sound economic alternative.

The unions are furious that the government is using the cover of coalition and a whipped-up fear over the deficit to terrify people into acceptance of what is little more than the rolling back of social provision. Pointing to the mounting dissent among economic experts over the government's approach, they say there is no programme for growth but only polices which will lead to a devastating contraction in the UK economy at a time when the global economy is still exhibiting deeply worrying signs of recession.

The unions say it is high time that the truth was told about the government's reckless policies. January will see the three embark on a programme of promoting an economic alternative to their members urging them to get active in both opposing cuts and making their voices heard at the May election, the first chance for large parts of country to vote on the government's cuts programme.

Central to the unions' message will be the push for an economic policy based on:

* Growth - and a clear programme for job creation

* Investment to get the unemployed back to work

* Maintaining universal, quality public services - and safeguarding them from costly private providers

* A fair taxation policy, including closing tax avoidance loopholes and a transaction tax which will generate billions for the economy

* Abandonment of welfare upheaval which will plunge families and communities into poverty

* Regulation of the economy to restore trust and confidence

Paul Kenny General Secretary of GMB said: "The deficit is not Labour's deficit, it's the bankers' deficit. The Labour Government had to borrow to save the UK economy from collapse due to the irresponsible actions of the bankers, a policy supported by the Conservatives in opposition.

"The banks' actions in pouring billions of pounds into risky and complex investments came unstuck and left tax payers and elected governments with a mess to clear up. This cost the UK £850 billion, a recession where we lost 6% of national output, two and half million unemployed, pay freezes, inflation rising and where taxation revenues fell suddenly.

"Unions had warned of the dangers of under-regulated financial sector and the banks now need regulating so it doesn't happen again. This is also the view of Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England."

Dave Prentis General Secretary of UNISON said: "It's clear that the Government is ideologically driven to massacre public services and bring the misery of unemployment and poverty to millions. This is a recipe for social turmoil on a scale not seen since the 80's. A whole generation of young people betrayed, facing a bleak future.

"Local Government is particularly hard hit by the cuts. 70,000 jobs have gone in the last months of 2010 and hundreds of thousands more will follow in 2011. This spells disaster for local communities and for people who need those services. The Big Society spin won't pick up the pieces of broken Britain's lost jobs and dashed hopes.

"We need a Government that will keep Britain working by investing in our economy, our services and our future."

Len McCluskey, General Secretary-designate of Unite said:

"It is possible to pull the UK economy out of recession without the misery of mass unemployment. This government is ripping a huge hole in the economy by contracting spending and throwing one and a half million people on the dole. But where is the Plan B? Where will the new jobs come from? Certainly not from a private sector which is reeling from the global downturn.

"We know all too well how this government can swing the axe; what we need to see more of is can they actually step up to the job of creating employment. Strategic investments can reap rewards far beyond the original outlay - for instance, a £6bn investment in affordable social housing would build 100,000 new homes and create 750,000 new jobs in construction and the manufacturing supply chain. This makes more economic sense than paying people to sit on the dole.

"Economic activism means not sitting on your hands. It is the duty of our government to actively support job creation. Roll your sleeves up, support investment, unlock the capital funds held in the banks and start creating the jobs needed to replace the million or so you have destroyed."

The three unions will be taking the message about the truth about the deficit and the Conservative-led government's approach to its members in the coming weeks, focusing on:

A fair economy:

· Fair taxes must be part of any solution. Systematically, companies and rich individuals have been avoiding more and more tax which means government squeezes greater amounts from working people.

· End to indirect taxes like VAT which hit the low paid proportionally harder.

· Regulation of the banking system to bring transparency; Government to use its controlling stake in UK banks to stop job cuts, excess pay and bonuses

· A transaction tax on City dealings, including trade in stocks, shares, currencies and derivatives

· A just welfare state which does not force people further into poverty and social exclusion Saving the NHS:

· The massive top-down £80 billion re-organisation of the NHS in England to break it into small local commissioning units tasked with employing private companies to find other private health providers to submit the cheapest bid for public health services.

· The down-grading of NICE will also see drug price rise and access to them severely curtailed.

· GP consortia will see the return of the postcode lottery.

· The scrapping of waiting lists will cause undoubted misery for countless people in need of treatment.

· These policies are all designed to ensure the private sector and overseas private health companies exert control over access to health services - however the service is still being funded by the UK taxpayer.

Good education for all:

· Free Schools and Academies in England will force schools to compete in a local market. In some areas, e.g. Wandsworth, they are prepared to spend tens of millions of pounds to promote this vision even when there are surplus places in some schools and existing schools in need of repair.

· The English student tuition fee hike to a maximum of £9,000 a year is not being introduced to deal with the current deficit, as it will bite after 2014 by which point the Chancellor claims the deficit will have been aid down, but to create a financial market place for colleges, courses and students.

· The end result will be students from wealthy families going to elite universities and, if not deterred by the debts, other students seeking out cheaper courses at cheaper colleges in cheaper locations. Social mobility will be thrown into reverse.

Economic activism

· Investment to put UK manufacturing at the forefront of economic development,

· Support to expand low carbon sustainable industries.

· Reversal of the decision to block a £80m loan to Sheffield Forgemasters.

· The urgent establishment of a Strategic Investment Fund, alongside the promised Green Investment Bank.

· Energy pricing policies which recognise the needs of industry.

· Public procurement processes to ensure maximum benefit for UK manufacturing.

ENDS

Win in Progressive Coalitions

2010-12-24T11:28:00.001Z

For many people the last two years have been extremely difficult. Once secure jobs have disappeared, communities have once again been split between those who have work and those who do not. I remember the last time things got this bad during the early eighties when almost the first exchange between people was not how are you but was “are you working?”

I wish I could say that I thought things were about to get better. In fact the bad news is that the next year or two are likely to get worse. Many jobs across our region are threatened by a reckless and ideological driven Conservative led Government intent on getting out of the public service delivery business. Instead they intend public services to be largely delivered by their friends in the private sector and on the basis of whether or not you can afford it.

Where I am optimistic for the next few years is that I do believe that we are about to see a resurgence in progressive political, grassroots organising. I think that the resurgence of organising will be on a different basis to that which we have seen before. Since the 1980’s we have seen the large scale development of new social media and a greater understanding by many organisations, such as UNISON and other trade unions, that organising strategies need to include plans for building coalitions of interest. A combination of these two trends will, I believe be a powerful force for change.

All unions, such as UNISON, are looking to build these coalitions of interest and for ways of harnessing the power of the new social media support our campaigns for jobs, services and communities. Its a two-way street and we want to support local campaigns in the region that stand up for our communities.

So while times are hard and likely to get harder we have a chance to influence change if we organise together for progressive politics. I for one am looking forward to the struggle ahead - as tough as it will be.

(This article first appeared in the Birmingham Mail on 22 December 2010)

Organisers speak out!!!!

2010-12-19T16:35:00.000Z

Sheffield Petition 7 April

2010-12-19T16:28:00.000Z

Stop the Lies

2010-12-19T16:18:00.000Z